Writer who broke norms
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Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley, who died recently, explored social issues in her works. June Gaur
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Compassionate quality: Elizabeth Jolley.
I believe it is necessary for the writer to have a kind of timid confidence, because for most of the time the writer has simply no idea, while he is writing, whether anyone will ever read what he is trying to express.
Elizabeth Jolley
ELIZABETH JOLLEY, one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers died recently. Her legacy, a kind of dark comedy, very clever and funny, has contributed enormously to the literary tradition of that country.
Jolley’s novels were a distinct departure from the style of earlier writers and paved the way for others to experiment. A late bloomer, her work began to be published only when she was in her fifties. Jolley continued to write in the way she wanted to, choosing her subjects from among the most marginalised in Australian society.
For someone who showed great daring in essaying subjects that readers were not quite ready to accept until fairly recently, Jolley was a very individual and private artist. It was no secret that her public persona, described as a “hybrid of everybody’s favourite auntie and the Queen Mother”, was a smokescreen for a sparkling sense of mischief that came through in astonishing ways. Before her long illness began in 2000, Jolley was a much sought-after presence at Writers’ Weeks.
Remarkable metaphor
There was no inherent contradiction between Jolley’s two lives: a dutiful wife and a writer who broke norms. Very early in her career, in a short story titled “Woman in a Lampshade” Jolley, who wrote so much of herself into her work yet always maintained that she preferred imagination to autobiography, used a remarkable metaphor. Jasmine Tredwell, the central character in this story, is transformed when she places a lampshade on her head and discovers that to wear the lampshade suggests “the dangerous and the exotic while still sheltered under a cosy domesticity”.
Jolley’s somewhat eccentric literary preoccupations and her consistent exploration of unconventional themes in her novels suggest the “dangerous and the exotic”.
Yet she chose a very domestic metaphor to describe her experience of writing. “Writing for me is a restless and ragged activity with scattered fragments to be pieced together rather like a patchwork quilt,” she said.
But the patchwork quilt is too limiting an image for the cleverness that characterises Jolley’s writing. And, as a critic has suggested, even the “self-fashioned” public image of a frail, elderly woman was perhaps a necessary one for her to assume in order to be able to “own” the subject matter of her fiction. Indeed, readers found it difficult to accept Jolley’s first published novel, Palomino (1980), with its exploration of a love affair betwee
n two women.
Sense of displacement
But, long before Palomino came out, Jolley’s stories had begun to appear in journals in the 1960s and 1970s. They dealt with the sense of displacement, even exile that she felt as a migrant from a coalmining town in northern E
ngland in 1959. The first story she wrote in Australia, around 1960, was “A Hedge of Rosemary”. “I suppose it contains things I had left behind...but it is more an enactment of the reality of transplantation and chosen exile experienced vicariously in childhood,” she wrote later.
Her first novel, though published later, was Milk and Honey, also about displacement and exile. In a moving self-portrait, “A Child went Forth”, Elizabeth Jolley explored those aspects of her life, which appear to have i
nfluenced her writing.
Daughter of an Englishman and an Austrian mother, Jolley grew up in a German-speaking household and went to a Quaker boarding school in England. She could never forget the landscape of her childhood: the coal mines and slag heaps and the hills of the Cotswolds and the heather of the Scottish moors.
One of her characters, Weekly in the novel The Newspaper of Claremont Street, was inspired by a dolls’ house with a well-kept kitchen that belonged to her sister.
Elizabeth Jolley was 36 when she came to Western Australia with her husband and three children. She worked at various jobs, including nursing and door-to-door sales and eventually writing and teaching.
After a slow and late start, (Palomino lay on a publisher’s desk for four years), Jolley’s career took off at the rate of almost a book a year. Her novels were translated into European languages and admiring reviewers ap
plauded her deceptively simple writing with its perverse twists of fate, pathos and macabre humour.
In her short stories and novels, Jolley continued to explore such contentious social issues as abortion, the failure of family life, single parenthood, childlessness, loneliness, illness, age, and death. Her stories are full of isolated and eccentric people, a little unhinged but with deep human sensitivity. If they appear to inhabit a crazy world, it is our world, and she draws them with compassion, wit and artistry.
Social misfits
From Mr. Scobie in Mr. Scobie’s Riddle to Alma Porch in Foxybaby, the characters of Jolley’s stories and novels are in varying degrees society’s misfits.
“Moments in the lives of the apparently commonplace men and women... And those for whom there is no place in our society form a vehicle for my picture of life,” she wrote.
It was her keen observation of everything around her, especially people, around whom her work is centred, which gave to Elizabeth Jolley’s writing its uniquely compassionate quality.
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