Elizabeth Backhouse

Enid Elizabeth Backhouse (21 May 1917 — 28 April 2013) was an Australian novelist, scriptwriter and playwright, best known for her family history Against Time and Place.

Early life Backhouse was born on 21 May 1917 in Northam, Western Australia, She learned violin and piano from her parents, and attended the local government school. A sexual assault when she was a girl changed her life: her vision and speech were affected, and her schoolwork and hopes for university suffered. There, she wrote her first three novels while off-duty. It was so popular that it went into a second edition. Her second book, The Sky Has Its Clouds (1944), and covered the period from 1920 to the outbreak of war, moving from a small Australian country town to Europe. One reviewer found it "very entertaining", another judged it "a well-constructed, fast-moving tale which holds the reader's interest from first page to last", and another considered that with it, "Miss Backhouse has established a very definite place for herself in the community of Australian authors."

Backhouse's third novel, Day Will Break (1945), "ambitious ... strong enough to overcome [its] handicap", to "readable", "too long", "rather dull". However, it "enjoy[ed] a great vogue", Enone and Quentin, "a fairy book full of romance and make-believe", was warmly received, with one reviewer describing it as "sheer delight, with fantasy as free as a child's heart." The same reviewer wrote that "it seems Miss Backhouse shudders away from suffering ... and cannot ask her readers to face anything but a happy ending", and that Leaves in the Wind, "a story of 3 illegitimate girls, is literally too good to be true." where she lived for five years During the 1950s and 1960s, she published one novella and six novels in this genre. The novella, A Wreath for the Party, appeared as a supplement to the Australian Women's Weekly in August 1954. The novel Death Came Uninvited, published in 1957 by Robert Hale of London, is an expanded version of the same story. It is set in London, with Inspector Christopher Marsden detecting, and was described as a "neatly devised work[] of homicide". Several of the novels were set in Western Australia and Death Climbs a Hill (1963) were set in the bush, and The Mists Came Down (1959) takes place on Rottnest Island. Most featured two Western Australian police detectives, Detective-Inspector Prentis and Detective Sergeant Landles. however, was an American private detective, "a thoughtful, intelligent hero in the English tradition, who solves a murder in a closed community with a measured calm that came to typify later Backhouse efforts." and performed at the Playhouse Theatre, Perth, in 1968. and had a play reading by the Melbourne Theatre Company in 1986. The Olive Tree (1975) was a 70 minute film for TV written and co-produced by Backhouse, which screened in Australia and the US. Backhouse also wrote the scenario for a ballet, KAL, and a musical, Dickens’ Magic. It "combines fact, legend and re-creations of dialogue", Another reviewer found it "indigestible" when attempting to read it as a whole, but good for "dipping into .... a poignant composition of beautifully drawn tableaus and vignettes". Extracts from Against Time and Place were published in several anthologies during the 1990s.

Personal life Backhouse had returned to Australia in 1951 because her father was seriously ill. While working during the day, she cared for him until his death in 1952. When her mother Hilda's health began to fail some years later, Backhouse brought her mother to live with her. They lived together for twenty-three years, until Hilda's death in 1984; She was a member of the Fellowship of Australian Writers (WA), and served as a committee member and vice-president. A regular church-goer in her childhood, she later became a Freemason and a believer in reincarnation. Backhouse died in North Perth, Western Australia, on 28 April 2013.

Selected works 1942 In Our Hands (contemporary novel) 1944 The Sky Has Its Clouds (contemporary novel) 1946 Enone and Quentin (children's book, illustrated by Irene Carter) 1957 Death Came Uninvited (Inspector Marsden mystery) 1959 The Mists Came Down (PI Steve Gillman mystery) 1962 Death of a Clown (Prentis and Landles mystery) 1963 Death Climbs a Hill (Prentis and Landles mystery) 1975 The Olive Tree (TV drama) 1979 KAL (ballet) 1990 Against Time and Place (family history)