JOLLEY, (Monica) Elizabeth

Nationality: Australian. Born: Elizabeth Knight in Birmingham, England, 4 June 1923; moved to Australia, 1959; became citizen, 1978. Education: Friends' School, Sibford, Oxfordshire, 1934-40; St. Thomas' Hospital, London (orthopaedic nursing training), 1940-43; Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham (general training), 1943-46. Family: Married Leonard Jolley; two daughters and one son. Career: Salesperson, nurse, and domestic, 1960s; part-time tutor in creative writing, Fremantle Arts Centre, Western Australia, from 1974; part-time tutor in English from 1978, writer-in-residence, 1982, and since 1984 half-time tutor in English, Western Australian Institute of Technology, Bentley; writer-in-residence, Scarborough Senior High School, Winter 1980, and Western Australian College of Advanced Education, Nedlands, 1983; half-time lecturer and writer-in-residence from 1986, and honorary writer-in-residence, from 1989, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia. Lives in Claremont, Western Australia. Awards: State of Victoria prize, for short story, 1966, 1981, 1982; Sound Stage prize, for radio play, 1975; Wieckhard prize. 1975; Australian Writers Guild prize, for radio play, 1982; Western Australia Week prize, 1983; The Age Book of the Year award, 1983, 1989; Australia Council Literature Board senior fellowship, 1984; New South Wales Premier's award, 1985; Australian Bicentennial National Literary award, 1986; Miles Franklin award, 1987; Fellowship of Australian Writers Ramsden plaque, 1988. D.Tech.: Western Australian Institute of Technology, 1986; Canada Australia prize, 1990; ASAL gold medal, for novel, 1991. Officer, Order of Australia, 1988; National Book Council Banjo Award; FAW ANA Literature Award; France-Australian Literary Translation Award. Honorary degrees: Macquarie University, 1995 and The University of Queensland, 1997. Member: Australian Society of Authors, 1985-86 (president).

Publications

Short Stories

Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories. 1976.

The Travelling Entertainer and Other Stories. 1979.

The Newspaper of Claremont Street (novella). 1981.

Woman in a Lampshade. 1983.

Miss Peabody's Inheritance (novella). 1983.

Stories. 1988.

Fellow Passengers. 1997.

Novels

Palomino. 1980.

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.

Central Mischief. 1992.

The Orchard Thieves. 1995.

Plays

Woman in a Lampshade (broadcast 1979). Published in Radio Quartet, 1980.

Radio Plays:

Night Report, 1975; The Performance, 1976; The Shepherd on the Roof, 1977; The Well-Bred Thief, 1977; Woman in a Lampshade, 1979; Two Men Running, 1981; Paper Children, 1988; Little Lewis Has Had a Lovely Sleep, 1990; The Well, 1991; Lorelei in the Wheat, 1993; The Silver Apples of the Moon and Repeat of Lorelei, 1994; The Georges' Wife, 1997.

Other

Travelling Notebook: Literature Notes. 1978.

Central Mischief (essays), edited by Caroline Lurie. 1992.

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Critical Studies:

articles by Jolley and by Laurie Clancy, in Australian Book Review, November 1983; Helen Garner, in Meanjin 2, 1983; "Between Two Worlds" by A. P. Riemer, in Southerly, 1983; "The Goddess, the Artist, and the Spinster" by Dorothy Jones, in Westerly 4, 1984; Joan Kirkby, in Meanjin 4, 1984; Martin Harrison, in The Age Monthly Review, May 1985; Jolley: New Critical Essays edited by Delys Bird and Brenda Walker, 1991; "Houses and Homes: Elizabeth Jolley's Mr. Scobie's Riddle and Beryl Gilroy's Frangipani House" by Mary Conde, in Framing the Word: Gender and Genre in Caribbean Women's Writing edited by Joan Anim Addo, 1996; "Home Breaking and Making in the Novels of Elizabeth Jolley" by John O'Brien, in Homemaking: Women Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home edited by Catherine Wiley and Fiona R. Barnes, 1996.

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An English immigrant to Australia, Elizabeth Jolley has emerged as one of the country's best-known contemporary writers of fiction. Born in the English Midlands, she was trained as a nurse. In 1959 she and her husband, a librarian, moved to Australia with their children. She has published a dozen brief novels, three collections of short stories, and a collection of short essays. Her work has been honored with various awards, including the Age Book of the Year Award for Mr. Scobie's Riddle and My Father's Moon, the New South Wales Premier's Award for Milk and Honey, the Miles Franklin Award for The Well, the National Book Council Banjo Award for The Georges' Wife, the FAW ANA Literature Award for Cabin Fever, and the France-Australia Literary Translation Award for The Sugar Mother. Her recent work, The Orchard Thieves, was published in 1995.

Jolley's fiction often centers on female characters who are in lesbian relationships and who live their lives without male companions. One recurrent theme in Jolley's body of work is the liaison between an older and a younger woman. Another theme plays with the author-audience relationship and the process of constructing and deconstructing the text. Jolley's work defies easy categorization, for she straddles the boundaries of the tragic and the comic. Her fiction notes the absurd, the hilarious, and the lonely aspects of human life, and her characters feed upon one another in meeting their needs. In a 1989 interview with Ray Wilbanks in Antipodes, Jolley said, "People take what they need from each other and if they don't have a relationship in one direction they will have it in another direction." While Jolley creates idyllic female worlds in which her characters are free to seek their own partners, her women characters may be trapped into dependency relationships, although her older women generally have economic strength without family attachments.

Jolley's first novel, Palomino (1980), deals with a love affair between Laura, a doctor, and Andrea, a younger woman whom she meets on a cruise. They later retire to Laura's farm. The idyllic affair concludes when Laura decides to preserve the beauty of her love before it dissipates from their differences in age. Jolley's novella The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1981) focuses on Newspaper or Weekly, a cleaning lady who dreams of owning land. Through her diligence she eventually is able to buy a plot, but she is tormented by Nastasya, an unwelcome companion. The narrative turns to violence when Weekly arranges for Nastasya's death to save her privacy.

Jolley's novella The Well (1986) repeats the older/younger female relationship first developed in Palomino and includes violence as well. Hester Harper, a middle-aged spinster, lives an isolated life in the outback with Katherine, an adolescent orphan she takes in. Fearing to lose Katherine when a friend plans to visit, Hester plunges into a fit of anxiety. The novel centers around acquisitiveness and pleasure as the women indulge their whims. Hester's obsession with Katherine blinds her to the world outside and threatens her financial security.

When Katherine, slightly tipsy, hits a man with the car, Hester deposits the body in the well. To protect Katherine, Hester feigns normality, but, according to Katherine, the body in the well is alive and wants to marry her. Jolley develops suspense and ambiguity by leaving open the possibility of more than one interpretation of the incident. Her narrative method is open-ended as she holds forth the promise of Hester retelling the same story or a new story. Truth and fiction overlap as Jolley uses Hester in the role of a storyteller at the end of the novella.

In the novella Miss Peabody's Inheritance (1983) the title character stays at home to take care of her sick mother. Through a lively correspondence with the novelist Diana Hopewell, Miss Peabody's life and the author's become blurred as they tell each other their stories. When the author dies, Miss Peabody replaces her by "inheriting" her novel. Thus, the author and reader roles are reversed. In the work Foxybaby, which again contemplates the problems of fiction writers, Jolley tells of Miss Alma Porch, who uses her current manuscript in a course at Trinity College. Here Jolley reiterates the subject of author and audience, exploring the limits of their relationship. The boundary between dream and reality disappears, leading Miss Porch to wonder if her life is a fiction.

Besides the female relationships revealed in a number of her works, Jolley engages the reader by her excursions into black comedy. The Sugar Mother (1988) treats the story of Edwin, a professor whose spouse Cecilia goes off on a fellowship, leaving him at the mercy of neighbors who manipulate him into taking the daughter, Leila, as a lover. When Leila bears a child, Edwin tries to conceal the affair from his friends. At the end, without a resolution to his situation, he awaits the return of his wife. The novel is comic, nightmarish, and bizarre.

Jolley's first short stories were compiled Five Acre Virgin and The Travelling Entertainer. Six stories in Five Acre Virgin deal with the Morgan family. The ironies of life appear in stories like "Five Acre Virgin," in which the protagonist, a cleaning lady, invites her friends along to see the homes of the wealthy and then ends up in jail, or in "'Suprise! Surprise!' from Matron," in which a centenarian who always desired to find a honey-filled tree and never did celebrates her birthday, while Donald (the Doll) and Fingertips win the Fern Hospital for the Aged by playing poker. Another hospital story, "A New World," features an elderly gentleman (number 14) who gives his food to number 12. The solitude of a lonely woman is revealed in "The Shepherd on the Roof" when she refers to her unhappy marriage.

Another collection of short stories, Woman in a Lampshade, also uses a hospital setting. In "Hilda's Wedding" the nurse-narrator manages to marry off the maid Hilda in a bizarre ceremony arranged by the night staff. After the ceremony Hilda goes into labor in the elevator. While the premise of the story is absurd, it is matched by odd characters such as Sister Bean, a presumed witch. "Paper Children," another story from the collection, tells of Clara Schultz, a gynecologist who fantasizes about traveling from Vienna to Australia, where her daughter and son-in-law live on a farm, but they die in a car accident in Clara's final "dream." Although the Viennese world of Clara appears to be refined, there is an underlying horror revealed in the suicide of Clara's husband, a Hebraic scholar who cannot face the idea of persecution in the 1930s.

In her short stories and novellas Jolley creates funny but sad characters. The tragic and the comic fuse in her writings, which often have a dark side. With an eye for the absurd and the peculiar, Jolley uses the storytelling techniques of wit, irony, suspense, and ambiguity. Where the author unnerves her reader is in her refusal to present only male-dominated worlds. She examines the possibilities of female relationships, sexual or asexual, and female utopias. The claustrophobia, destructiveness, and selfishness of some of the relationships lead to the conclusion that they fail to enhance human potential. Jolley, however, offers no overarching philosophy or worldview to answer the dilemmas of human existence. Instead, she extends her narratives through her open-ended techniques, and her fiction poses no easy resolution for the reader. As a contemporary Australian writer and postmodernist, Jolley creates fiction that is wide-ranging in scope and that eludes simple categorization.

—Shirley J. Paolini

See the essay on "Grasshoppers."