Elizabeth Jolley

Monica Elizabeth Jolley (4 June 1923 – 13 February 2007) was an English-born Australian writer who settled in Western Australia in 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 as Tim Winton among her students at Curtin University.

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

Life

Jolley was born in Birmingham, England as Monica Elizabeth Knight, to an English father and Austrian-born mother who was the daughter of a high ranking Railways official. She grew up in the Black Country in the English industrial Midlands. She was educated privately until age 11, when she was sent to Sibford School, a Quaker boarding 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.

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 the Reid Library at the University 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.

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 the Western Australian Institute of Technology, later Curtin University, and one of her students was another Australian novelist, Tim Winton. Her students have won many prizes including "several Australian/Vogel Awards (for a first novel), several different Premier's Awards, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Miles Franklin Award".

Andrew Riemer, the Sydney 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".

On 16 November 2007, the performance of Johannes Brahms's A German Requiem by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, chorus and soloists, under conductor Lothar Zagrosek, was dedicated to Jolley, for whom the Requiem had been a great source of joy and inspiration.

Literary career 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" – 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 as Helen Garner and Germaine Greer.

Later in her career she wrote an autobiographical fiction trilogy, My Father's Moon (1989), Cabin Fever (1990) and The Georges' Wife (1993). In an article in The Age newspaper, 20 February 2007, written after her death, literary critic Peter 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". Lovesong, her third last novel, is, Riemer suggests, "the riskiest book she wrote". 1983: Western Australian Premier's Book Awards for Mr Scobie's Riddle 1985: New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction for Milk and Honey 1986: Miles Franklin Award for The Well 1987: Western Australia Citizen of the Year 1988: Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for services to literature 1988: Western Australian Institute of Technology Honorary Doctorate 1989: The Age Book of the Year Award, winner for My Father's Moon 1989: Canada/Australia Literary Award 1993: The Age Book of the Year Award, winner for The Georges' Wife 1993: Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, Premier's prize for Central Mischief

Literary works

Novels Palomino (1980) The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1981) Miss Peabody's Inheritance (1983) Mr Scobie's Riddle (1983) Milk and Honey (1984) Foxybaby (1985) The Well (1986) The Sugar Mother (1988) My Father's Moon (1989) Cabin Fever (1990) The Georges' Wife (1993) The Orchard Thieves (1995) Lovesong (1997) An Accommodating Spouse (1999) An Innocent Gentleman (2001)

Short stories and plays Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories (1976) The Well-Bred Thief (1977) The Travelling Entertainer and Other Stories (1979) Woman in a Lampshade (1983) Off the Air: Nine Plays for Radio (1995) Fellow Passengers: Collected Stories of Elizabeth Jolley (1997)

Non-fiction Central Mischief: Elizabeth Jolley on Writing, Her Past and Herself (1992) Diary of a Weekend Farmer (1993) Learning to Dance: Elizabeth Jolley: Her Life and Work (2006)