Lesbia Harford was born in 1891. She published few poems in her lifetime. Her work, gathered in posthumous collections and various anthologies, has since been acclaimed for its clear and unadorned style. A congenital heart defect kept her in poor health her whole life and she died in 1927, at the age of thirty-six.

Gerald Murnane was born in Coburg, a northern suburb of Melbourne, in 1939. He spent some of his childhood in country Victoria before returning to Melbourne in 1949 where he lived for the next sixty years. He has left Victoria only a handful of times and has never been on an aeroplane.

In 1957 Murnane began training for the Catholic priesthood...