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Elizabeth Jolley

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Elizabeth Jolley
Professor Elizabeth Jolley
Born
Monica Elizabeth Knight

(1923-06-04)4 June 1923
Birmingham,England
Died13 February 2007(2007-02-13)(aged 83)
Perth,Western Australia,Australia
Occupation(s)Novelist, professor of creative writing
SpouseLeonard Jolley
Children3

Monica Elizabeth JolleyAO(4 June 1923 – 13 February 2007) was an English-born Australian writer who settled inWestern Australiain the late 1950s and forged an illustrious literary career there. She was 53 when her first book was published, and she went on to publish fifteen novels (including an autobiographical trilogy), four short story collections and three non-fiction books, publishing well into her 70s and achieving significant critical acclaim. She was also a pioneer of creative writing teaching in Australia, counting many well-known writers such asTim Wintonamong her students atCurtin University.[1]

Her novels explore "alienated characters and the nature of loneliness and entrapment."[2]

Life[edit]

Elizabeth Jolley and (younger) sister Madelaine Winifred reading, ca. 1927

Jolley was born inBirmingham,England asMonica Elizabeth Knight,to an English father and Austrian-born mother who was the daughter of a high ranking Railways official.[3]She grew up in theBlack Countryin the English industrialMidlands.She was educated privately until age 11, when she was sent toSibford School,aQuakerboarding school near Banbury in Oxfordshire which she attended from 1934 to 1940.

At 17 she began training as an orthopaedic nurse in London and later in Surrey. She began an affair with one of her patients, Leonard Jolley (1914–1994), and subsequently became pregnant. Leonard Jolley was already married to Joyce Jolley, who was also pregnant. Elizabeth moved in with the Jolleys, and her daughter Sarah was born five weeks before the birth of Susan Jolley, the child of Leonard and Joyce.[4][5]

Elizabeth and Leonard subsequently emigrated to Australia in 1959 after they had married. They eventually had three children and Leonard was appointed chief librarian at theReid Libraryat theUniversity of Western Australia,a job he held from 1960 to 1979. Leonard told his family in England that it was Joyce and Susan with whom he had moved to Australia. For several years, Elizabeth wrote letters purportedly from Joyce and Susan to Leonard's British relatives. Leonard eventually asked his former wife to tell their daughter Susan that he had died.[4]

Elizabeth and Leonard lived in the riverside Perth suburb ofClaremont.In 1970 they also bought a small orchard inWooroloo,a town in the Darling Ranges approximately 60 kilometres inland from Perth.[6]

Elizabeth Jolley worked at a variety of jobs including nursing, cleaning, door-to-door sales and running a small poultry farm, and throughout this time she also wrote works of fiction including short stories, plays and novels. Her first book was published in 1976, when she was 53.

From the late 1970s, she taught writing at theWestern Australian Institute of Technology,laterCurtin University,and one of her students was another Australian novelist,Tim Winton.[7]Her students have won many prizes including "severalAustralian/Vogel Awards (for a first novel), several different Premier's Awards, theCommonwealth Poetry Prizeand the Miles Franklin Award ".[1]

She developeddementiain 2000, and died in a nursing home in Perth in 2007. Her death prompted many tributes in newspapers across Australia, and inThe Guardianin the United Kingdom. Her diaries, stored at theMitchell LibraryinSydney,will be closed until after the deaths of her children or 25 years after her death.[8]

Andrew Riemer,theSydney Morning Herald's chief book reviewer, wrote in his obituary for her, "Jolley could assume any one of several personas – the little old lady, the Central European intellectual, the nurse, the orchardist, the humble wife, the university teacher, the door-to-door salesperson – at the drop of a hat, usually choosing one that would disconcert her listeners, but hold them in fascination as well".[9]

On 16 November 2007, the performance ofJohannes Brahms'sA German Requiemby theWest Australian Symphony Orchestra,chorus and soloists, under conductorLothar Zagrosek,was dedicated to Jolley, for whom the Requiem had been a great source of joy and inspiration.[10]

Literary career[edit]

Jolley began writing early in her twenties, but was not recognised until much later. She had many rejections by publishers, 39 in one year alone. Delys Bird suggests that it was the post-modern features of her writing – "motifs repeated within and between novels and short stories, self-reflexivity and open-endedness"[11]– that made it hard for them to be published at that time. She suggests that her eventual success owes a little to "the 1980s awareness of 'women's writing'", which had been catapulted to the mainstream after the success of other Australian female writers such asHelen GarnerandGermaine Greer.[11]

In the 1960s some of her stories were accepted by the BBC World Service and Australian journals, but her first bookFive Acre Virginwas not published until 1976. Soon following wereWoman in a LampshadeandPalomino,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 withMiss Peabody's InheritanceandMr Scobie's Riddle.The latter wonThe Age Book of the Yearand high acclaim, especially in Australia and the United States. A year later,Milk and Honeywas awarded Christina Stead Prize for fiction in theNew South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.In 1986,The Wellwon the top Australian literary prize – theMiles Franklin Award.The Sugar Motherwas, as Riemer writes, "her characteristically idiosyncratic way of fulfilling a commission to write a novel commemorating the bicentenary of 1988".[12]

Later in her career she wrote anautobiographical fictiontrilogy,My Father's Moon(1989),Cabin Fever(1990) andThe Georges’ Wife(1993). In an article inThe Agenewspaper, 20 February 2007, written after her death, literary criticPeter Craven,was reported as saying, "She was a master of black comedy and she went on to write a wholly different form of autobiographical fiction that was lucid, luminous and calm".[13]

Lovesong,her third last novel, is, Riemer suggests, "the riskiest book she wrote".[12]It deals with the subject of paedophilia and demonstrates "an admirable refusal to be deflected from what she must have seen as the demands of her art and vocation".[12]

In 1993, a diary she kept before her novels were published which recorded the experience of buying a hobby farm was published asDiary of a Weekend Farmer.A partly autobiographical collection of pieces,Central Mischief,appeared in 1992. She also wrote numerous radio plays broadcast by theAustralian Broadcasting Corporation,and several of her poetic works were published in journals and anthologies during the 1980s and 1990s.

Jolley was made a professor of Creative Writing atCurtin Universityin 1998.

On 8 February 2008,Curtin UniversityLibrary launched the online Elizabeth Jolley Research Collection, a virtual research centre for scholars interested in studying her and her work.

Awards and nominations[edit]

Literary works[edit]

Novels[edit]

Short stories and plays[edit]

Non-fiction[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^abHacket (2007)
  2. ^"Elizabeth Jolley Research Collection".curtin.edu.au.23 January 2008.
  3. ^Christopher Hawtree (6 March 2007)."Obituary: Elizabeth Jolley".The Guardian.
  4. ^abSwingler, Susan (24 May 2014)."The secret sister my father kept hidden".The Guardian.
  5. ^"The House of Fiction by Susan Swingler - Book Review - Truth, Lies".The Sydney Morning Herald.4 May 2012.
  6. ^Elizabeth Jolley (Obituary inThe Times)
  7. ^Taylor and Gosch (2007)
  8. ^Jolley's diary to be kept a secret
  9. ^"A witty adventurer in fiction".smh.com.au.23 February 2007.
  10. ^Limelight,January 2008, p. 55
  11. ^abBird (2000) p. 195
  12. ^abcRiemer (2007)
  13. ^Steger (2007)
  14. ^It's an Honour– Officer of the Order of Australia

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

Library resourcesabout
Elizabeth Jolley
By Elizabeth Jolley

External links[edit]

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