Elizabeth Jolley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Elizabeth Jolley, AO (4 June 1923 – February 13, 2007) was an English-born author notable in Australian literature for her series of critically acclaimed novels based upon the alienated characters and the nature of loneliness and entrapment.
Contents |
[edit] Early life
Elizabeth Jolley was born in Birmingham, England as Monica Elizabeth Knight, to an English father and Austrian-born mother who was the daughter of a general. She grew up in the Black Country in Britain's industrial Midlands. She was educated privately until age 11, when she was sent to a Quaker boarding school. At 17 she began training as nurse in London and was exposed first hand to the horrors of World War II. She emigrated to Australia in 1959 with her husband Leonard and three children.
[edit] Literary career
Jolley began writing early in her twenties, but was not recognized or published until much later. She had many rejections by publishers, 39 in one year alone. In the 1960s some of her stories were accepted by the BBC World Service and Australian journals, but her first book Five Acre Virgin was not published until 1976. Soon following were Woman in a Lampshade and Palomino, but it would not be until much later that these books would receive either positive reviews or high circulation.
She lapsed in her writing, discouraged by earlier failures, and was only to be published again in 1983 with Miss Peabody's Inheritance and Mr Scobie's Riddle. The latter won the Age Book of the Year and high acclaim, especially in Australia and the United States. A year later, Milk and Honey was awarded the NSW Premier's Prize for Fiction. In 1986, The Well won the top Australian literary prize - the Miles Franklin Award. She continued to write popular novels until the end of the decade, after which time she focused mainly on smaller projects.
In 1993 a diary she kept before her novels were published which recorded the experience of buying a hobby farm was published as Diary of a Weekend Farmer. A partly autobiographical collection of pieces, Central Mischief, appeared in 1992. She also wrote numerous radio plays broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and several of her poetic works were published in journals and anthologies during the 1980s and 1990s.
Throughout her adult life, she was encouraged by her husband, Leonard Jolley. The family moved from Britain to Australia when Leonard was appointed chief librarian at the Reid Library at the University of Western Australia. Endowed with an intellect as sharp as his wife's, Leonard was deeply committed to her; he was the strongest supporter and a constructive critic of his wife's work, and their relationship sometimes seemed to echo that of Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Writers from all over the world were dinner guests in their modest house, full of books and surrounded by trees, in the riverside Perth suburb of Claremont. Leonard died in the early 1990s.
Elizabeth Jolley was awarded the Canada/Australia Literary Award in 1989, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Western Australian Institute of Technology, where a lecture Theatre was also named in her honor, in 1987.
In 1988 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for her services to literature.
Elizabeth Jolley was made a Professor of Creative Writing at Curtin University in 1998. She continued to publish novels, short stories, and a work of autobiography well into her 70s. She died in Perth, Western Australia after suffering from dementia for several years. Her death prompted many generous tributes in newspapers across Australia and in the Guardian in the U.K.
[edit] Literary style
The characters of Jolley's stories and novels are in varying degrees society's misfits; whether they are old, foreign, lonely, eccentric, poor, or simply regarded as deviant, they are outsiders, dispossessed and diminished. The sadness of their lives is frequently moderated by the inventiveness of their strategies for survival – often described with a mix of wry affection, dark humour and satirical realism. The concept of alienation or displacement is common to most of Jolley's novels.
Her characters often inhabit various forms of prisons – a gothic boarding house in Milk and Honey, a maternity home in Cabin Fever, an isolated farm in Palomino and The Well. Stories developed by Jolley usually centred on the protagonists' bizarre methods of coping and gritty convictions of significance.
Jolley commented that she was interested in the individual's particular form of loneliness or fear, which imposes life on the fringe. "I suppose I'm interested to explore the inside of people's survival – bitter knowledge, grief and unwanted realization often go side by side with acceptance, love and hope." Cruelty, emotional manipulation, territorial aggression and financial exploitation are also natural to a great many of her characters, and her underlying view of the human condition – although counter pointed somewhat with empathy and compassion – is necessarily bleak.
Her books are often interconnected by characters who appear again or in almost identical form in other novels, and certain incidences and situations recur in many of her stories – although the responses to these situations is are varied and drawn out in different ways amongst different texts.
Like other highly original Australian writers such as Patrick White and Les Murray, Elizabeth Jolley brought to her writing a profound love and understanding of the Australian climate, landscape, nature and people.
[edit] Literary works
- Five Acre Virgin (1976)
- The Travelling Entertainer (1979)
- Palomino (1980)
- The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1981)
- Miss Peabody's Inheritance (1983)
- Mr Scobie's Riddle (1983)
- Woman in a Lampshade (1983)
- Milk and Honey (novel) (1984)
- Foxybaby (1985)
- The Well (1986)
- The Sugar Mother (1988)
- My Father's Moon (1989)
- Cabin Fever (1990)
- Central Mischief: Elizabeth Jolley on Writing, Her Past and Herself (1992)
- The Georges' Wife (1993)
- Diary of a Weekend Farmer (1993)
- The Orchard Thieves (1995)
- Off the Air: Nine Plays for Radio (1995)
- Fellow Passengers: Collected Stories of Elizabeth Jolley (1997)
- Lovesong (1997)
- An Accommodating Spouse (1999)
- An Innocent Gentleman (2001)
- Learning to Dance: Elizabeth Jolley: Her Life and Work (2006)
[edit] References
- Bird, Delys, and Brenda Walker, eds. (1991) Elizabeth Jolley: New Critical Essays. (Angus and Robertson: North Ryde, New South Wales)
- Salzman, Paul. (1993) Hopelessly Tangled in Female Arms and Legs: Elizabeth Jolley's Fictions. (U of Queensland P: St Lucia, Queensland)
- McCowan, Sandra. 1995) Reading and Writing Elizabeth Jolley: Contemporary Approaches. (Fremantle Arts Centre P: Fremantle, Western Australia)
- Wilde, W., Hooton, J. & Andrews, B. (2000) The Oxford Companion of Australian Literature, 2nd Edition (Oxford UP: Adelaide, South Australia)
For further information search various academic journals and publications related to the study of Australian literature. A great many scholarly papers and essays on Jolley's various works have been published in the last twenty years.
