Elizabeth Jolley
Encyclopedia
Monica Elizabeth Jolley AO
(4 June 1923 – 13 February 2007) was an English-born writer who settled in Western Australia
in the late 1950s. 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.
Her novels explore "alienated characters and the nature of loneliness and entrapment."
, 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 the English industrial Midlands
. She was educated privately until age 11, when she was sent to Sibford School
, a Quaker
boarding school. During the 1930s, as war loomed, her family's home was full of refugees from Europe, creating, she later said, "a mysterious world for us children".
At 17 she began training as nurse in London and was exposed firsthand to the horrors of World War II
. She emigrated to Australia in 1959 with her husband Leonard (1914–1994) and three children, when Leonard was appointed chief librarian at the Reid Library at the University of Western Australia
, a job he held from 1960-1979.
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
. They also bought, in 1970, a small orchard in Wooroloo, a town in the Darling Ranges approximately 60 kilometres inland from Perth.
Jolley worked at a variety of jobs, including nursing, cleaning, door to door sales and running a small poultry farm, but through all this time she wrote fiction; short stories, plays and novels. However, she did not have a book published until 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". A lecture theatre at Curtin University is named after her and since 1991 the University has held an annual lecture series in her name. Speakers have included Ruth Cracknell
, Barry Humphries
, Carmen Lawrence
, Hilary McPhee, Pat Dodson and Robert Drewe
.
As Riemer wrote in his obituary, "Everyone who knew her has a favourite Elizabeth Jolley story". He continues, later in the obituary, to say that "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".
She developed dementia in 2000, and died in a nursing home in Perth in 2007. Her death prompted many tributes in newspapers across Australia, and in The Guardian
in the U.K. Her diaries, stored at the Mitchell Library
, NSW, will be closed until after the deaths of her children or 25 years after her death.
On 16 November 2007, the performance of Brahms' Ein deutsches 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.
In the 1960s some of her stories were accepted by the BBC World Service and Australia
n 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 Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards
. In 1986, The Well won the top Australian literary prize - the Miles Franklin Award
. The Sugar Mother was, as Riemer writes, "her characteristically idiosyncratic way of fulfilling a commission to write a novel commemorating the bicentenary of 1988".
Later in her career she wrote an autobiographical fiction trilogy, "My Father's Moon", "Cabin Fever" and 'The George's Wife". 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". It deals with the subject of pedophilia and demonstrates "an admirable refusal to be deflected from what she must have seen as the demands of her art and vocation".
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.
Jolley was made a Professor of Creative Writing at Curtin University in 1998.
On 8 February 2008, Curtin University Library launched the online Elizabeth Jolley Research Collection, a virtual research centre for scholars interested in studying her and her work.
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, displacement or exile is common to most of Jolley's novels.
Jolley said this about finding her characters: "I don't really know. I suppose I must see something, I might see somebody in a shop, doing something, taking something or choosing something and that interests me. And I then might go home and make a note about it. Miss Thorne in Miss Peabody's Inheritance, I actually saw at a dinner party. Well, it was a buffet dinner, really, not where you sit around a table. I never spoke to the woman, but she was sitting on the floor in a navy blue frock, a very big pile of dark hair, a very powerful woman. That kind of thing will give me a character"
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.
Riemer suggests that her father's side "must have been held responsible for her wry sense of the subterranean anarchy of rigidly controlled British (and Australian) institutions - hospitals, boarding schools and old-age homes - which she evoked memorably in novel after novel" and that her Austrian heritage accounted for "her often nighmarish imagination and certainly for her fascination with German-language culture, the snippets of Goethe and Schubert
lied
er that crop up throughout her work".
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 counterpointed somewhat with empathy and compassion – is necessarily bleak.
While Jolley is often thought of as a primarily urban writer, many of her works - particularly Palomino, The Newspaper of Claremont Street, The Well, and her nonfictional Diary of a Weekend Farmer - are "intensely permeated with the landscape" and include women farmers who choose to farm their land.
Her books are often interconnected by characters who appear again or in almost identical form in other novels, and certain incidents 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. Helen Garner
writes about this quality in her writing: "She will take a situation, a relationship, a moment of insight, a particular longing, and work on it in half a dozen different versions, making the characters older or younger, changing their gender or their class, gaoling or releasing a father, adding or subtracting a murder or a suicide; and these repetitions and reusings, conscious but not to the point of being orchestrated, set up a pattern of echoes which unifies the world, and is most seductive and comforting".
Garner also comments on the humour in Jolley's writing: "Elizabeth Jolley is a very funny writer ... she is droll, sly, often delicate ... she is offhand, with a batty sideways slip that I find hilarious".
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.
Order of Australia
The Order of Australia is an order of chivalry established on 14 February 1975 by Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia, "for the purpose of according recognition to Australian citizens and other persons for achievement or for meritorious service"...
(4 June 1923 – 13 February 2007) was an English-born writer who settled in Western Australia
Western Australia
Western Australia is a state of Australia, occupying the entire western third of the Australian continent. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Great Australian Bight and Indian Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east and South Australia to the south-east...
in the late 1950s. 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
Tim Winton
Timothy John "Tim" Winton , is an Australian novelist and short story writer.-Life:Winton was born in Perth, Western Australia, but moved at a young age to the regional city of Albany....
among her students.
Her novels explore "alienated characters and the nature of loneliness and entrapment."
Life
Jolley was born in BirminghamBirmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
, 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
Black Country
The Black Country is a loosely defined area of the English West Midlands conurbation, to the north and west of Birmingham, and to the south and east of Wolverhampton. During the industrial revolution in the 19th century this area had become one of the most intensely industrialised in the nation...
in the English industrial Midlands
English Midlands
The Midlands, or the English Midlands, is the traditional name for the area comprising central England that broadly corresponds to the early medieval Kingdom of Mercia. It borders Southern England, Northern England, East Anglia and Wales. Its largest city is Birmingham, and it was an important...
. She was educated privately until age 11, when she was sent to Sibford School
Sibford School
Sibford School is a British co-educational independent school in Sibford Ferris, west of Banbury in Oxfordshire, linked with the Religious Society of Friends. The school has both day and boarding pupils between the ages of 3 and 18.-Overview:...
, a Quaker
Religious Society of Friends
The Religious Society of Friends, or Friends Church, is a Christian movement which stresses the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Members are known as Friends, or popularly as Quakers. It is made of independent organisations, which have split from one another due to doctrinal differences...
boarding school. During the 1930s, as war loomed, her family's home was full of refugees from Europe, creating, she later said, "a mysterious world for us children".
At 17 she began training as nurse in London and was exposed firsthand to the horrors of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. She emigrated to Australia in 1959 with her husband Leonard (1914–1994) and three children, when Leonard was appointed chief librarian at the Reid Library at the University of Western Australia
University of Western Australia
The University of Western Australia was established by an Act of the Western Australian Parliament in February 1911, and began teaching students for the first time in 1913. It is the oldest university in the state of Western Australia and the only university in the state to be a member of the...
, a job he held from 1960-1979.
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
Claremont, Western Australia
Claremont is a western suburb of Perth, Western Australia on the north bank of the Swan River.-History:Prior to European settlement, the Noongar people used the area as a source of water, for fishing and for catching waterfowl. In 1830, John Butler, a settler, set up an inn at Freshwater Bay to...
. They also bought, in 1970, a small orchard in Wooroloo, a town in the Darling Ranges approximately 60 kilometres inland from Perth.
Jolley worked at a variety of jobs, including nursing, cleaning, door to door sales and running a small poultry farm, but through all this time she wrote fiction; short stories, plays and novels. However, she did not have a book published until 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
Vogel
Vogel is the German and Dutch word for "bird" and is a common surname originating in German-speaking countries. Equivalent surnames are Bird or Byrd in English or L'Oiseau in French...
Awards (for a first novel), several different Premier's Awards, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Miles Franklin Award". A lecture theatre at Curtin University is named after her and since 1991 the University has held an annual lecture series in her name. Speakers have included Ruth Cracknell
Ruth Cracknell
Ruth Cracknell AM was an Australian theatre and television character actress who appeared in many comedy roles. She was known variously as "Crackers", "Dame Crackers" and "Dame Ruth" throughout a career spanning 56 years....
, Barry Humphries
Barry Humphries
John Barry Humphries, AO, CBE is an Australian comedian, satirist, dadaist, artist, author and character actor, best known for his on-stage and television alter egos Dame Edna Everage, a Melbourne housewife and "gigastar", and Sir Les Patterson, Australia's foul-mouthed cultural attaché to the...
, Carmen Lawrence
Carmen Lawrence
Carmen Mary Lawrence is a retired Australian politician; a former Premier of Western Australia and the first woman to become Premier of a State of the Commonwealth of Australia....
, Hilary McPhee, Pat Dodson and Robert Drewe
Robert Drewe
Robert Duncan Drewe is an Australian journalist, novelist and short story writer.-Biography:Drewe was born in Melbourne, but moved with his family to Perth, Western Australia at the age of six. He was educated at Hale School, and in his final year was appointed School Captain...
.
As Riemer wrote in his obituary, "Everyone who knew her has a favourite Elizabeth Jolley story". He continues, later in the obituary, to say that "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".
She developed dementia in 2000, and died in a nursing home in Perth in 2007. Her death prompted many tributes in newspapers across Australia, and in The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
in the U.K. Her diaries, stored at the Mitchell Library
Mitchell Library
The Mitchell Library is a large public library and centre of the public library system of Glasgow, Scotland.-History:The library was established with a bequest from Stephen Mitchell, a wealthy tobacco manufacturer, whose company, Stephen Mitchell & Son, would become one of the constituent members...
, NSW, will be closed until after the deaths of her children or 25 years after her death.
On 16 November 2007, the performance of Brahms' Ein deutsches Requiem
Ein deutsches Requiem
A German Requiem, To Words of the Holy Scriptures, Op. 45 by Johannes Brahms, is a large-scale work for chorus, orchestra, and a soprano and a baritone soloist, composed between 1865 and 1868. It comprises seven movements, which together last 65 to 80 minutes, making this work Brahms's longest...
by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra
West Australian Symphony Orchestra
The West Australian Symphony Orchestra , often known as the "Orchestra of the West", is the premier professional orchestra of the state of Western Australia.-History:...
, chorus and soloists, under conductor Lothar Zagrosek
Lothar Zagrosek
Lothar Zagrosek is a German conductor. As a youth, he sang in the Regensburg Cathedral choir, including performances as the First Boy in The Magic Flute at the 1954 Salzburg Festival...
, 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 recognized 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'".In the 1960s some of her stories were accepted by the BBC World Service and Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
n 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
The Age Book of the Year
The Age Book of the Year Awards are annual literary awards presented by Melbourne's The Age newspaper. The awards were first presented in 1974. Since 1998 they have been presented as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival...
and high acclaim, especially in Australia and the United States. A year later, Milk and Honey was awarded Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards
New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards
The New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards were established in 1979 by the New South Wales Premier Neville Wran. Commenting on its purpose, Wran said: "We want the arts to take, and be seen to take, their proper place in our social priorities...
. In 1986, The Well won the top Australian literary prize - the Miles Franklin Award
Miles Franklin Award
The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize for the best Australian ‘published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases’. The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin , who is best known for writing the Australian classic My Brilliant Career ...
. The Sugar Mother was, as Riemer writes, "her characteristically idiosyncratic way of fulfilling a commission to write a novel commemorating the bicentenary of 1988".
Later in her career she wrote an autobiographical fiction trilogy, "My Father's Moon", "Cabin Fever" and 'The George's Wife". 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". It deals with the subject of pedophilia and demonstrates "an admirable refusal to be deflected from what she must have seen as the demands of her art and vocation".
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.
Jolley was made a Professor of Creative Writing at Curtin University in 1998.
On 8 February 2008, Curtin University Library launched the online Elizabeth Jolley Research Collection, a virtual research centre for scholars interested in studying her and her work.
Literary style and themes
Jolley's style comprises an "unusual mixture of ... late-twentieth century modernism ... and a neo-nineteenth century humanism." Bird suggests that this humanism provides "solace for readers whose equilibrium may be threatened by [her] deracinated wit and uncanny narrative techniques."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, displacement or exile is common to most of Jolley's novels.
Jolley said this about finding her characters: "I don't really know. I suppose I must see something, I might see somebody in a shop, doing something, taking something or choosing something and that interests me. And I then might go home and make a note about it. Miss Thorne in Miss Peabody's Inheritance, I actually saw at a dinner party. Well, it was a buffet dinner, really, not where you sit around a table. I never spoke to the woman, but she was sitting on the floor in a navy blue frock, a very big pile of dark hair, a very powerful woman. That kind of thing will give me a character"
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.
Riemer suggests that her father's side "must have been held responsible for her wry sense of the subterranean anarchy of rigidly controlled British (and Australian) institutions - hospitals, boarding schools and old-age homes - which she evoked memorably in novel after novel" and that her Austrian heritage accounted for "her often nighmarish imagination and certainly for her fascination with German-language culture, the snippets of Goethe and Schubert
Franz Schubert
Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer.Although he died at an early age, Schubert was tremendously prolific. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies , liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music...
lied
Lied
is a German word literally meaning "song", usually used to describe romantic songs setting German poems of reasonably high literary aspirations, especially during the nineteenth century, beginning with Carl Loewe, Heinrich Marschner, and Franz Schubert and culminating with Hugo Wolf...
er that crop up throughout her work".
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
Psychological manipulation
Psychological manipulation is a type of social influence that aims to change the perception or behavior of others through underhanded, deceptive, or even abusive tactics. By advancing the interests of the manipulator, often at the other's expense, such methods could be considered exploitative,...
, territorial aggression and financial exploitation are also natural to a great many of her characters, and her underlying view of the human condition – although counterpointed somewhat with empathy and compassion – is necessarily bleak.
While Jolley is often thought of as a primarily urban writer, many of her works - particularly Palomino, The Newspaper of Claremont Street, The Well, and her nonfictional Diary of a Weekend Farmer - are "intensely permeated with the landscape" and include women farmers who choose to farm their land.
Her books are often interconnected by characters who appear again or in almost identical form in other novels, and certain incidents 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. Helen Garner
Helen Garner
Helen Garner is an award-winning Australian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist.-Life:Garner was born in Geelong, Victoria, the eldest of six children. She attended Manifold Heights State School, Ocean Grove State School and then The Hermitage in Geelong...
writes about this quality in her writing: "She will take a situation, a relationship, a moment of insight, a particular longing, and work on it in half a dozen different versions, making the characters older or younger, changing their gender or their class, gaoling or releasing a father, adding or subtracting a murder or a suicide; and these repetitions and reusings, conscious but not to the point of being orchestrated, set up a pattern of echoes which unifies the world, and is most seductive and comforting".
Garner also comments on the humour in Jolley's writing: "Elizabeth Jolley is a very funny writer ... she is droll, sly, often delicate ... she is offhand, with a batty sideways slip that I find hilarious".
Like other highly original Australian writers such as Patrick White
Patrick White
Patrick Victor Martindale White , an Australian author, is widely regarded as an important English-language novelist of the 20th century. From 1935 until his death, he published 12 novels, two short-story collections and eight plays.White's fiction employs humour, florid prose, shifting narrative...
and Les Murray
Les Murray (poet)
Leslie Allan Murray, AO , known as Les Murray, is an Australian poet, anthologist and critic. His career spans over forty years, and he has published nearly 30 volumes of poetry, as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings...
, Elizabeth Jolley brought to her writing a profound love and understanding of the Australian climate, landscape, nature and people.
Awards and nominations
- 1983: The Age Book of the YearThe Age Book of the YearThe Age Book of the Year Awards are annual literary awards presented by Melbourne's The Age newspaper. The awards were first presented in 1974. Since 1998 they have been presented as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival...
Award for Mr Scobie's Riddle - 1983: Western Australian Premier's Book AwardsWestern Australian Premier's Book AwardsThe Western Australian Premier's Book Awards is an award for books, scripts, digital narrative and a People's Choice. Awards are provided by the Government of Western Australia, and the awards process is managed by the State Library of Western Australia...
for Mr Scobie's Riddle' - 1985: New South Wales Premier's Literary AwardsNew South Wales Premier's Literary AwardsThe New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards were established in 1979 by the New South Wales Premier Neville Wran. Commenting on its purpose, Wran said: "We want the arts to take, and be seen to take, their proper place in our social priorities...
, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction for Milk and Honey - 1986: Miles Franklin AwardMiles Franklin AwardThe Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize for the best Australian ‘published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases’. The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin , who is best known for writing the Australian classic My Brilliant Career ...
for The Well - 1987: Western Australia Citizen of the Year
- 1988: Officer of the Order of AustraliaOrder of AustraliaThe Order of Australia is an order of chivalry established on 14 February 1975 by Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia, "for the purpose of according recognition to Australian citizens and other persons for achievement or for meritorious service"...
(AO) for services to literature - 1988: Western Australian Institute of Technology Honorary Doctorate
- 1989: The Age Book of the YearThe Age Book of the YearThe Age Book of the Year Awards are annual literary awards presented by Melbourne's The Age newspaper. The awards were first presented in 1974. Since 1998 they have been presented as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival...
Award, joint winner for My Father's Moon - 1989: Canada/Australia Literary Award
- 1993: The Age Book of the YearThe Age Book of the YearThe Age Book of the Year Awards are annual literary awards presented by Melbourne's The Age newspaper. The awards were first presented in 1974. Since 1998 they have been presented as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival...
Award, joint winner for The George's Wife - 1993: Western Australian Premier's Book AwardsWestern Australian Premier's Book AwardsThe Western Australian Premier's Book Awards is an award for books, scripts, digital narrative and a People's Choice. Awards are provided by the Government of Western Australia, and the awards process is managed by the State Library of Western Australia...
, Premier's prize for Central Mischief - 1994: National Book Council Award, Banjo for The George's Wife
- 1995: Macquarie UniversityMacquarie UniversityMacquarie University is an Australian public teaching and research university located in Sydney, with its main campus situated in Macquarie Park. Founded in 1964 by the New South Wales Government, it was the third university to be established in the metropolitan area of Sydney...
Honorary Doctorate - 1997: Australian Living TreasureAustralian Living TreasuresAustralian Living Treasures are people who have been nominated by the National Trust of Australia. The first list of 100 Living Treasures was published in 1997....
- 1997: University of QueenslandUniversity of QueenslandThe University of Queensland, also known as UQ, is a public university located in state of Queensland, Australia. Founded in 1909, it is the oldest and largest university in Queensland and the fifth oldest in the nation...
Honorary Doctorate - 1998: Miles Franklin AwardMiles Franklin AwardThe Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize for the best Australian ‘published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases’. The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin , who is best known for writing the Australian classic My Brilliant Career ...
shortlist for Lovesong
Novels
- Palomino (1980)
- The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1981)
- Miss Peabody's Inheritance (1983)
- Mr Scobie's Riddle (1983)
- Milk and HoneyMilk and Honey (novel)Milk and Honey is a 1990 novel by Faye Kellerman, Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus series, William Morrow and Company. It takes place about eighteen months after Sacred and Profane, when Decker is 41, in Los Angeles, in the Foothill Division of the LAPD....
(1984) - Foxybaby (1985)
- The WellThe Well (novel)The Well is a Miles Franklin Award winning novel by Australian author Elizabeth Jolley. It tells the story of two women, Hester and her young ward Katherine, and their relationship with one another. Hester, who has lived alone on a farm with her father for many years, is possessive of the much...
(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)
External links
- Elizabeth Jolley Research Collection Accessed: 2008-02-23
- http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/2432613.htm Transcript of interview with Brian Dibble, Jolley's biographer on his book "Doing Life", by Ramona KovalRamona KovalRamona Koval is an Australian broadcaster, writer and journalist.Her parents were Yiddish-speaking survivors of the Holocaust who arrived in Melbourne from Poland in 1950....
, The Book ShowThe Book ShowThe Book Show is an Australian ABC radio program for the discussion of everything relating to the written word. It is broadcast live around Australia on Radio National with a daily weekday morning show which is then replayed nightly and also has a Sunday evening show. The show is hosted by Ramona...
, ABC Radio National, 2/12/08 - Delys Bird, 'Gertrude and Elizabeth: Letters, Lives and Fictions' JASAL 2 (2003)
- Barbara Milech 'Elizabeth Jolley, Mr Berringrton and the Resistance to Monogamy' JASAL 3 (2004)
- Brian Dibble 'Mothers, Daughters and Elizabeth Jolley's Ethic of Hope' JASAL 4 (2005)
Further reading
- Bird, Delys, and Walker, Brenda (eds) (1991) Elizabeth Jolley: New Critical Essays Angus and Robertson: North Ryde, New South Wales
External links
- Elzabeth Jolley Research Collection at Curtin University