Elizabeth Jolley gives hope to everyone who has reached middle-age and not yet fulfilled their dream of becoming a famous writer. Through her twenties, thirties, and forties she kept writing despite little success and many rejections. She was 53 when her first book, the short story collection Five Acre Virgin (1976), was published by Fremantle Press. Over the next 25 years she published over twenty books, most of them novels. Her final book was the novel An Innocent Gentleman, published in 2001. Jolley was once one of Australia’s most popular authors and her work still has much to offer readers today. Curtin academic Barbara Milech writes, ‘Jolley’s fiction is never dull. It is comic, lyric, tragic and meditative in turn.’ (Fellow Passenger, p. xiii) The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature gives a good overview of Jolley’s work – her characters ‘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 imaginative inventiveness of their strategies for survival, described with a mix of wry affection, dark humour, compassion and satirical realism.’
A good place to start reading Jolley’s work is The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1981), another of her books published by Fremantle Press. The ‘Newspaper’ of the title is actually a woman, also known as ‘Weekly’, who cleans houses on Claremont Street, spreading news and gossip as well as caring for the needs of the bizarre characters of the community. Weekly dreams about the pile of money she is slowly accumulating and of buying her own plot of land in the country but a needy neighbour with aristocratic airs threatens to overwhelm Weekly with her demands. It’s a short and darkly humorous novel which also evokes so well Jolley’s home suburb of Claremont. In an interview Curtin University Library conducted with Jolley’s typist, Nancy McKenzie, McKenzie says she instantly recognised the eccentric little shop in the novel as having a real-life counterpart on Princess Road in Claremont, near the primary school.
The Well (1986) is another good entry point to Elizabeth Jolley’s work. At its heart is an unorthodox relationship between a middle-aged eccentric named Hester and her much younger friend, Katherine, who live together on a farm. Their relationship and their sanity unravel after they run over a creature at night and throw the body into a well. Jolley called it ‘very claustrophobic… both Katherine and Hester are going through a kind of fantasy or nightmare, each in her own way.’ (Washington Post, 2 November 1986) The novel won the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize. In 1997, it was adapted as a feature film directed by Samantha Lang and starring Pamela Rabe and Miranda Otto.
If you just want a taste of Elizabeth Jolley, she was a superb short story writer. Some of her early pieces were published in Western Australia’s literary magazine, Westerly, and have now been made available freely online. “The Rhyme” appears in Westerly 12.4 from 1967 – the PDF can be downloaded here, with her story on page 46.
We are showcasing Jolley’s books in our Centenary of Elizabeth Jolley exhibition on level 3 of Robertson Library. Print books not on display can be requested for retrieval through the catalogue. You can read the Library’s ebook copies of The Newspaper of Claremont Street here and Miss Peabody’s Inheritance here. We will also have Read and Return copies of some of her novels available – watch out for them, they’re coming soon!
