Elizabeth Jolley RIP

meant to post this earlier. go buy one of her books if you don't have any.



Elizabeth Jolley, 83, writer
AUSTRALIAN NOVELIST BOASTED A DISTINCTIVE LITERARY STYLE
By Margalit Fox
New York Times
Article Launched: 04/14/2007 01:35:53 AM PDT

Elizabeth Jolley, an Australian writer who came to wide public attention only late in life, but whose distinctive literary voice and eccentric literary preoccupations eventually made her one of her country's most acclaimed novelists, died in Perth on Feb. 13. She was 83.

Ms. Jolley's family did not publicize her death, which was only recently reported outside Australia. No cause was given. The Australian Associated Press reported that she had suffered from dementia in recent years.

An idiosyncratic stylist whose dark, delicately brooding novels of social dysfunction were sometimes described as Australian Gothic, Ms. Jolley had the quality of an antipodean Shirley Jackson. But if the critics agreed on anything after trying and repeatedly failing to liken Jolley to other writers - the usual suspects were Barbara Pym, Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O'Connor and Edgar Allan Poe - it was that she was ultimately beyond category.

"Yo' should 'ave seen the mess after the Venns' Party," a cleaning woman tells her employer in Ms. Jolley's short story "Pear Tree Dance." "Broken glass everywhere, blood on the stairs and a whole pile of half-eaten pizzas in the laundry. Some people think they're having a good time! And you'll never believe this, I picked up a bed jacket, ever so pretty it was, to wash it and, would you believe, there was a yuman arm in it."

In her work, more than a dozen novels and several story collections, Ms. Jolley was passionately concerned
with misfits: the very lonely, the slightly dotty, the gently murderous and the perfectly monstrous. In the Elizabeth Jolley universe, it is entirely normal to be abnormal. Two strangers - a woman and her nubile daughter - show up at the home of a married man and take up residence there. Two women drop a man's body into a well. He is already dead - or perhaps not.

But beneath their mordant dark comedy, Ms. Jolley's books explored deep, haunting themes of alienation, marginalization and unrequited longing. Among her best-known novels are "Mr. Scobie's Riddle" (first published in the United States by Penguin in 1984); "Miss Peabody's Inheritance" (Viking, 1984); "The Well" (Penguin, 1987), and "The Sugar Mother" (Harper & Row, 1988).

Monica Elizabeth Knight was born on June 4, 1923, in Birmingham, England, the daughter of an English father and a Viennese mother. Her parents were ardent pacifists, and after being privately educated as a young child, Elizabeth was sent to a Quaker boarding school. During World War II, she trained as a nurse in London.

She married Leonard Jolley, a librarian, and in 1959 the family moved to Perth, where Jolley established the library at the University of Western Australia. Over the next several decades, Ms. Jolley did a variety of jobs, including nursing, selling things door to door and running a small poultry farm, all the while writing fiction. She amassed a stupendous collection of rejection slips, 39 in one year alone.

Her first two books, the story collections "Five Acre Virgin" and "The Travelling Entertainer," were published in Australia in the late 1970s, when she was in her 50s. Her first novel, "Palomino," was published there in 1980. In recounting the story of romantic love between women, a frequent theme in Ms. Jolley's work, "Palomino" took on a subject that until then had been considered largely taboo in Australian letters.

Ms. Jolley's husband died in the 1990s. Her survivors include three children, Sarah, Richard and Ruth, and several grandchildren. Information on other survivors could not be confirmed.

Among her other novels are "Milk and Honey" (Persea, 1986); "My Father's Moon" (Harper & Row, 1989) and its sequel, "Cabin Fever" (HarperPerennial, 1991); "The Orchard Thieves" (Viking, 1995) and "An Innocent Gentleman" (Viking, 2001).

Jolley's off-kilter style was not to every critic's taste. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1986, Robert Coover encapsulated both the perils and the pleasures of her distinctive voice:

"Elizabeth Jolley's writing, even at its best, it should be said, seems ultimately somewhat slight, her great gifts devoted on the whole to entertainments more witty than profound. There is a recurring familiarity about her characters and themes, and she has an appetite for plots that tend to erase themselves, in the way that punch lines erase their jokes, thereby weakening our emotional attachment to them."