Elizabeth Jolley

English-born Australian novelist, short-story writer, and playwright

• Born: June 4, 1923
• Birthplace: Birmingham, Warwickshire (now in West Midlands), England
• Died: February 13, 2007
• Place of death: Perth, Western Australia, Australia

Biography

Monica Elizabeth Jolley is considered one of Western Australia’s most important writers. Born in England of an English father and an Austrian mother, she was brought up in a German-speaking household and educated first at home and then at Friends’ School, a Quaker boarding school in Sibford, Oxfordshire. She completed orthopedic nursing training at St. Thomas Hospital, London, in 1943 and three years later the general nursing training at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. In 1959, she moved to Western Australia with her husband and their three children.

For the next twenty years, Jolley worked as a nurse, a door-to-door salesperson, a flying domestic, and, after 1974, a part-time tutor at Western Australia’s Fremantle Arts Center. During this period, she wrote much but published very little, and what she published attracted little attention until the publication in 1976 of her first book, Five Acre Virgin, and Other Stories, a collection of short stories written during the sixteen preceding years. Five Acre Virgin, and Other Stories is important because it reveals both Jolley’s preoccupation with certain themes and her ability to handle those themes realistically and with original, often bizarre, humor. The publication of Five Acre Virgin, and Other Stories marked a turning point in Jolley’s writing career, after which Jolley became increasingly prolific. With her third novel, Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, she established herself as one of Western Australia’s more important writers.

Three years after the appearance of Five Acre Virgin, and Other Stories, Jolley published a second collection of short fiction, The Travelling Entertainer, and Other Stories. Like the stories in the first collection, the longer pieces in The Travelling Entertainer, and Other Stories came from the period before she became known. This second collection reveals for the first time the extent to which Jolley’s writing tended to be work in progress. Both Five Acre Virgin, and Other Stories and The Travelling Entertainer, and Other Stories contain elements to which she returned repeatedly. This tendency to rewrite material and reuse themes and techniques is likewise evident in the novels Palomino and Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, both of which are concerned with love between women and both of which are revisions of earlier works.

One of Jolley’s favorite themes was the obsession of the dispossessed with owning land. Many of her characters are migrants or loners, as is, for example the cleaning woman in The Newspaper of Claremont Street. Called “Weekly” (or “Newspaper”) because of her penchant for spreading gossip, she labors toward the one goal of owning a few acres of her own, a goal that becomes “a daily vision”; because of this vision the money she earns scrubbing the floors of others has for Weekly “the fragrance of roses and honeysuckle and fresh country air.”

Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, which some consider her best novel, focuses on a question about life itself. Mr. Scobie is a former piano teacher who has been forced to move to a nursing hospital for the elderly, an institution operated and overseen by a matron named Price and a night attendant named Shady. This setting provides a framework for Jolley’s examination of such themes as aging, nursing homes and hospitals, loneliness and loners, music and literature and their relationship to life, writers and writing, and love between women. These themes are handled expertly, primarily because of Jolley’s humor, often a consequence of her well-developed sense of incongruity. Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, despite its setting, avoids being depressing because of Jolley’s ability to discover the ludicrous even in the grimmest of situations.

Jolley's last novel published would be 2001's An Innocent Gentleman. Caroline Lurie put together a selection of Jolley's short stories, poems, and essays, including two previously unpublished pieces, for the essentially autobiographical work Learning to Dance: Elizabeth Jolley; Her Life and Work (2006). Following a struggle with dementia, Jolley died on February 13, 2007, in Perth, Australia, at the age of eighty-three.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Palomino, 1980

The Newspaper of Claremont Street, 1981

Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, 1983

Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, 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 Fiction:

Five Acre Virgin, and Other Stories, 1976

The Travelling Entertainer, and Other Stories, 1979

Woman in a Lampshade, 1983

Stories, 1984

Fellow Passengers: Collected Stories, 1997

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 a Lovely Sleep, 1988

The Well, 1992

Off the Air: Nine Plays for Radio, 1995

Nonfiction:

Central Mischief: Elizabeth Jolley on Writing, Her Past, and Herself, 1992 (Caroline Lurie, editor)

Diary of a Weekend Farmer, 1993

Learning to Dance: Elizabeth Jolley; Her Life and Work, 2006

Bibliography

Baines, Pilar. "Down in Elizabeth Jolley's The Well: An Essay on Repression." Journal of Language, Literature & Culture, vol. 61, no. 1, 2014, pp. 46–59. Analyzes Jolley's The Well as an example of the use of the Gothic style to provide commentary regarding female repression in patriarchal societies.

Bird, Delys. Introduction to Off the Air: Nine Plays for Radio, by Elizabeth Jolley. New York: Viking Penguin, 1995. Bird provides information on the background and the production of Jolley’s plays as well as interpretative commentary on major themes.

Bird, Delys, and Brend Walker, eds. Elizabeth Jolley: New Critical Essays. North Ryde, Australia: Angus and Robertson, 1991. Criticism and interpretation of Jolley’s works. Includes bibliographic references.

Daniel, Helen. “A Literary Offering, Elizabeth Jolley.” In Liars: Australian New Novelists. New York: Penguin Books, 1988. In this comprehensive study, Jolley’s fiction is compared to a musical composition by Johann Sebastian Bach, consisting of component literary fugues. The essay appears in a book devoted to Jolley and seven other contemporary Australian novelists, and includes a primary and selected secondary bibliography.

Jones, Dorothy. “Surveying the Promised Land: Elizabeth Jolley’s Milk and Honey.” Semeia 88 (1999): 97–111. Analyzes Jolley’s work from a postcolonialist perspective.

Kirkby, Joan. “The Spinster and the Missing Mother in the Fiction of Elizabeth Jolley.” In Old Maids to Radical Spinsters: Unmarried Women in the Twentieth Century Novel, edited by Laura L. Doan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Considers Jolley’s use of single women in her fiction.

McCowan, Sandra. Reading and Writing Elizabeth Jolley: Contemporary Approaches. South Freemantle, Western Australia: Freemantle Arts Centre Press, 1995. A collection of essays from a variety of critical perspectives.

Manning, Gerald F. “Sunsets and Sunrises: Nursing Home as Microcosm in Memento Mori and Mr. Scobie’s Riddle.” Ariel 18, no. 2 (1987): 27–43. This comparative study takes up the similarities in Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori and Jolley’s Mr. Scobie’s Riddle. The two novels share setting (a nursing home) and theme (age, loneliness, and alienation), and both authors make imaginative use of tragicomic devices to enrich their tone. These works attempt to discover an answer that will lead to the acceptance of death.

Salzman, Paul. Helplessly Tangled in Female Arms and Legs: Elizabeth Jolley’s Fictions. St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1993. A small but useful book containing information about Jolley’s fiction. Includes bibliographic references.

Thomson, Alistair. “Landscapes of Memory.” Meanjin 61, no. 3 (2002): 81–95. Compares Jolley’s own biography with the themes and material in her fiction.

Turcotte, Gerry. “Sexual Gothic: Marian Engel’s Bear and Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well.” Ariel 26, no. 2 (1995): 65–94. Feminist study of Jolley’s novel analyzing her use of the gothic as a way of challenging patriarchal constraints on female experience.

Westerly 31, no. 2 (1986). Entitled “Focus on Elizabeth Jolley,” this special issue of an Australian journal provides essays on various aspects of Jolley’s work, including one on the way her fiction connects to form a continuum, one on her novel Milk and Honey, and another on her handling of displaced persons. Also includes fiction by Jolley.

Willbanks, Ray. “Elizabeth Jolley.” In Speaking Volumes: Australian Voices, Writers and Their Work. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. An interview with Jolley, largely on her fiction.