Monica Elizabeth Jolley AO (4 June 1923–13 February 2007) was an English-born award-winning writer who settled in Western Australia in the late 1950s. She was 53 years old 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."
Elizabeth Jolley was born in Birmingham, 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.
Endowed with an intellect as sharp as his wife's, Leonard was deeply committed to her; he was the strongest supporter and a constructive critic of his wife's work. 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 small town in the Darling Ranges approximately 60 kilometres inland from Perth.
Jolley worked at a variety of jobs during her life, 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 years old.
From the late 1970s, she taught writing at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, later Curtin University, and one of her students was another celebrated 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 Elizabeth Jolley, for whom the Requiem had been a great source of joy and inspiration.
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 Australian 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.
Elizabeth 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.
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 lieder 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.
