Elizabeth Costello
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Elizabeth Costello is a 2003 novel by South African Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee.
In this novel, Elizabeth Costello, an aging Australian writer, travels around the world and gives lectures on topics including the lives of animals and literary censorship. In her youth, Costello wrote The House on Eccles Street, a novel that re-tells James Joyce's Ulysses from the perspective of his wife, Molly Bloom. Costello, becoming weary from old age, confronts her fame, which seems further and further removed from who she has become, and struggles with issues of belief, vegetarianism, sexuality, language, and evil.
Many of the lectures she gives are edited pieces that Coetzee previously published.
The character Elizabeth Costello also appears in Coetzee's 2005 novel Slow Man.
Background Fiction:
The second last chapter, "At the Gate", is an overt reworking of several of Kafka's stories and novels, principally of "Before the Law" and "The Trial". The last chapter consists of the letter of Lady Chandos to Francis Bacon. This is a fictitious intertext to the well-known 'Chandos'-letter by Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1902). The 'Chandos'-letter, in which the narrator Philip Lord Chandos laments that language has begun to fail his need for self-expression, is often cited as a key-text of literary modernism. Coetzee's fabrication of Lady Chandos' letter replicates what in the novel Elizabeth Costello herself is presented having done, namely, to add a female voice (that of Molly Bloom) to a canonical modernist work (Ulysses).
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| John Maxwell Coetzee |
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| Novels |
| Dusklands (1974) • In the Heart of the Country (1977) • Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) • Life & Times of Michael K (1983) • Foe (1986) • Age of Iron (1990) • The Master of Petersburg (1994) • Disgrace (1999) • Elizabeth Costello (2003) • Slow Man (2005) |
| Essays |
| White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988) • Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (1992) • Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1996) • The Lives of Animals (1999) • Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999 (2001) |
| Autobiographical works |
| Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) • Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002) |
