OBITUARY: Elizabeth Jolley
Elizabeth Jolley, AO
June 4, 1923- February 13, 2007
For a heartfelt, unsentimental, funny and characteristically canny appreciation of Elizabeth Jolley, you could do no better than to Google www.theage.com.au/news/books/ to-my-dear-liftrat/2005/. There you will find "To my dear Lift Rat", a tribute written by Helen Garner in The Age in June, 2005 when it first became publicly known that Jolley was suffering from dementia.
"We were not close friends," Garner is careful to point out, lest she offend those who were, but they corresponded for more than 20 years in a meeting of minds and senses of humour that caused Garner to write in that Age appreciation:
"Late in the 1990s, when I was living in Sydney, Elizabeth came to town for some literary event. We made a date to go out for dinner. I was to pick her up at her hotel, the swanky Hyde Park Hyatt where her publisher had installed her. I arrived in the lobby. No sign of a thin, tall, old lady in a loose cotton dress, with Roman sandals on her beautiful, bony feet. What was the polite thing? Should I go up to her room?
"I approached the twin banks of lifts. The one at the far end landed with a discreet ping. Its door hissed open. Nobody appeared. Then, in profile to me, a grey, bespectacled head poked out, like that of a rat cautiously preparing to leave its hole. It swung this way and that. Its eye caught mine. It was Elizabeth.
"I won't try to describe what she would call our 'endless laughing fit', the way we staggered about the lobby on sagging legs. But from that evening on, she signed her letters 'Lift-Rat', and that's how I addressed her."
Elizabeth Jolley was born in Birmingham, England, in 1923. Her mother was Viennese and the household was German-speaking (as was the punctuation of her fiction many decades later). Jolley was educated at home and at a Quaker boarding school. When she was 17 and in the middle of WW2, she began nursing studies in London.
By war's end she was married to Leonard and when he was appointed chief librarian at the Reid Library at the University of Western Australia, she unquestioningly migrated to Western Australia with him and their three children in 1959. As evidenced in her fiction, Jolley then undertook any number of weird and not so wonderful jobs to eke out the family finances.
She wasn't much good at any of them in her own opinion and all the time she was writing. In those days it was an expensive business: paper and the bulky packages of manuscript which had to be posted off to publishers in Britain took up much of her spare cash.
Becoming a part-time creative writing tutor at the Fremantle Arts Centre was more to her liking and she taught there for more than ten years. She was in her 50s by the time her own writing talent was finally recognised. Her first book, Five Acre Virgin, was published in 1976, soon followed by Woman in a Lampshade and Palomino. The best-seller lists did not happen immediately however and neither did glowing reviews.
It wasn't until 1983 and Miss Peabody's Inheritance that readers and critics began to take real notice. Jolley won The Age Book of the Year Award three times (for Mr Scobie's Riddle, My Father's Moon, and The Georges' Wife). Milk and Honey was awarded the NSW Premier's Prize for Fiction and the 1986 Miles Franklin Award went to The Well - later made into a successful movie. Her non-fiction title, Central Mischief, won the Western Australian Premiers non-fiction Prize in 1993 while Mr Scobie's Riddle won the Fiction section of that prize in 1983.
Diary of a Weekend Farmer was published in 1993 and wryly and lovingly chronicled her hobby farmer's (mis)adventures and glowed with her love of the land and working it. Jolley also wrote radio plays, short prose and poetry, all with the hallmark distinctive wry humour, compassion and clear-eyed view of alienation and loneliness.
Jolley's was an original and often disturbing talent, misunderstood by some but passionately loved by those who "got" her. She was one of a kind: an Australian voice that came from elsewhere and therefore was profoundly authentic and lived in.
Bibliography
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 Story Collections
Five Acre Virgin 1976, The Travelling Entertainer 1979, Woman in a Lampshade 1983, Stories 1984 (contains all the stories from Five Acre Virgin and The Travelling Entertainer), Fellow Passengers: Collected Stories of Elizabeth Jolley - edited and introduced by Barbara Milech, 1997
Drama
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 1988, Off the Air: Nine Plays for Radio edited and introduced by Delys Bird, 1995.
Non-Fiction
Central Mischief 1992 - edited by Caroline Lurie, Diary of a Weekend Farmer 1993
Biographical compilation by Caroline Lurie: Learning to Dance: Elizabeth Jolley, Her Life and Work (Viking, 2006)
