This is a book review I wrote for Amazon, reproduced for this blog.

Fiction is most compelling when it replicates the intrigues and uncertainties of life. Furthermore the best fiction springs from personal experience. In my opinion this is why Elizabeth Jolley, the author of “The Georges’ Wife” has become recognised as such a fine novelist. She writes fiction that is gripping, credible and relevant.

Even the curious title is deeply thought-provoking. Vera never marries Mr George. The Church Bells of the very last chapter is a school-girl memory of the Sunday morning call to worship, not a belated formal celebration of a durable union between a man and a woman. In what sense could Vera have been wife to Mr George’s attentive sister? The very suggestion outrages conventional morality.

The George duo rescue her from homelessness and penury by granting her a secure position of paid servitude as their maid, denying her the honourable status and authority of wife even when Mr George grasps the opportunity to add sexual benefits to her unwritten job description as maid. He baulks at acknowledging this to his sister, even although she senses the change and is tearful the next morning after they first sleep together.

To what extent does Elizabeth Jolley betray in this book her feelings towards the already married Leonard Jolley to whom she became pregnant as a young trainee nurse during the difficult years of World War II? He was an older man, a sophisticated University graduate whose love of literature and music and similar conservative religious views won her heart. She was his nurse when treated for suspected tuberculosis of the hip but eventually diagnosed as a manifestation of rheumatoid arthritis.

Although charming and kind to her, he proved to be a duplicitous womanizer, a cad. Having had his fun he did not safe-guard her good name and support her adequately when she became pregnant. He brought her shame in the eyes of her Quaker family and nursing friends, ended her training, and forced her to seek menial tasks to survive.

To add insult to injury he self-righteously enlisted her help in not even informing his own family of his indiscretion. When he did act to resolve his dilemma it was deeply hurtful and difficult for his wife, and broke the trust of his doting four-year old daughter Susan. Leonard did secretly marry Elizabeth, and became increasingly dependent on her. They lived first in Scotland and in 1959, they migrated to Perth in Australia. Leonard passed away in 1994 the year after this book was first published in Australia.

Vera never complained of her unmarried lot with Mr George. She was grateful for the security and companionship her unusual liaison provided, but craved more. Undoubtedly it was why she turned to the intellectually stimulating but alarmingly poor friends Noël and Felicity who scavenged their coal supplies from a nearby slag heap, and were grateful when Vera brought them a cucumber she found which had fallen to the road from a passing vehicle. Tragically Noël contracted pulmonary tuberculosis, and passed on the germ to Vera.

To their credit the Georges supported Vera and her two girls during her illness, and afterwards when she studied Medicine, but was it the loving relationship it might have been?

Elizabeth’s own story, hinted at in the reminiscences of Vera, but recorded accurately in Brian Dibble’s detailed biography, is much more riveting for being true. Intelligent, and well-educated, Elizabeth was born of a good German-speaking family with deeply held Pacifist scruples. She felt acutely the cutting reproaches of her efficient but brusque mother while her tolerant and loving father was the inspiration for her own fortitude in coping with her marital difficulties.

I enjoyed reading “The Georges’ Wife” and rate it as the best of her books that I have read thus far.

I wrote this book review for Amazon, and take the liberty of reproducing it here.

I purchased a paper-back copy of “The Vera Wright Trilogy” a month ago and have now finished reading the first volume “My Father’s Moon”. I wanted to read this compilation of three of her best novels because they are recognised as the most autobiographical of her 23 literary works, and I wished to understand Elizabeth Jolley as a person, as well as an Australian writer of the twentieth century with an international reputation, who passed away in 2007.

I was disappointed when the book first arrived, and I thumbed through its pages. There was no plot. It was a collection of disjointed, out of sequence reminiscences, as they had sprung to her mind. Numerous characters entered the narrative with little introduction, only to be abandoned without mention as they sank from her memory.

But then I started reading “My Father’s Moon” from the beginning and became increasingly absorbed with her yarn, knowing that in the fictional character Vera Wright, she has related her own intimate experiences as a school-girl maturing into womanhood. Her recollections, still vivid, express her inner thoughts and feelings, some cherished, others painful.

The opening scene is a painful one. To her parents’ dismay she had become pregnant out of wedlock, and had bravely chosen to keep her child Helena, despite the ongoing shame and hardship for single mothers then. On her own, Vera returned to live with her parents, but soon became all too aware of her Austrian mother’s disapproval, and disappointment. When her mother reproached her for “breeding like a rabbit” and then made a pitch for custody of Helena, a shamed Vera could bear the humiliation no longer. In anger she flung the baby’s milk bottle across the kitchen, and vowed to go and never return, taking her toddler with her.

Although he shared his wife’s restrictive Quaker beliefs, her father expressed no criticism. He loved her too dearly to wound her further with his words. Instead he tried to comfort her with the thought that when she saw the moon, wherever she was, he would see it too, and would be thinking of her.

It was also precious to her how he always accompanied her to the railway station when she left home, whether it was for school, the hospital nursing home, or on the last occasion for a bleak, impersonal institution at which in return for her domestic labour she would be able to obtain food and lodging, and early school for Helena. On such occasions her father would linger chatting with her until the train doors closed, and as the departing train gathered speed, he would run along the platform for final glimpses, until at the end of the platform, he would stand waving and waving until he lost sight of the train in the distance.

Elizabeth Jolley in her stories of Vera Wright, expresses regret for having treated some kind folk, including no doubt her own family, shabbily. She had always tried to be honest in her self-assessments, and in these stories, she is apologetic over events in her life of which she is not proud. It must be said by way of explanation rather than excuse, that we all are victims, or beneficiaries, of the circumstances in which we live.

Her most formative years were adversely affected by the outbreak of the Second World War with Germany. Although she was born into a caring middle-class home, and received a good Quaker boarding school education, she missed the security of the life she knew at home. When after she finished school she chose to become a nurse, contrary to her mother’s wishes, she needed, as did all nurses of the day, to live in crowded hospital nursing quarters.

Institutional life cut short the family nurturing she craved, but as a result she became more resourceful and independent. She was industrious in her study and became an outstanding student who successfully competed for high grades, as well as for the respect and affection of others. Naively, she did not always foresee the reverses that life can bring; reverses she had to endure and manage on her own.

What conclusions have I made of Elizabeth Jolley’s character after reading the first volume of her trilogy? It seems to me that she was a lovable and loving girl. She was smart and popular, vivacious and fun-loving, one everyone wished to befriend, even if it meant over-looking her tendency to scheme and connive to secure the things she coveted. She became capable when needed, of imaginative fabrications more often than not, for the benefit of those she loved.

Australians have adopted Elizabeth Jolley as one of their own, and are proud of her successes and many awards. But she writes more feelingly of her early life in the more culturally aware United Kingdom, than of the less cultured Australian society to which she migrated with her husband in 1959.

Touching as they do on some of life’s most moving events, her works will endure, to be read and enjoyed in the years to come. I would encourage others to study her books, and to make their own conclusions about her life and works.