Elizabeth Jolley - Life

Life

Jolley was born in Birmingham, England as Monica Elizabeth Knight, to an English father and Austrian-born mother who was the daughter of a general. She grew up in the Black Country in the English industrial Midlands. She was educated privately until age 11, when she was sent to Sibford School, a Quaker boarding school. During the 1930s, as war loomed, her family's home was full of refugees from Europe, creating, she later said, "a mysterious world for us children".

At 17 she began training as nurse in London and was exposed firsthand to the horrors of World War II. She emigrated to Australia in 1959 with her husband Leonard (1914–1994) and three children, when Leonard was appointed chief librarian at the Reid Library at the University of Western Australia, a job he held from 1960-1979.

Writers from all over the world were dinner guests in their modest house, full of books and surrounded by trees, in the riverside Perth suburb of Claremont. They also bought, in 1970, a small orchard in Wooroloo, a town in the Darling Ranges approximately 60 kilometres inland from Perth.

Jolley worked at a variety of jobs, including nursing, cleaning, door to door sales and running a small poultry farm, but through all this time she wrote fiction; short stories, plays and novels. However, she did not have a book published until 1976, when she was 53.

From the late 1970s, she taught writing at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, later Curtin University, and one of her students was another Australian novelist, Tim Winton. Her students have won many prizes including "several Australian/Vogel Awards (for a first novel), several different Premier's Awards, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Miles Franklin Award". A lecture theatre at Curtin University is named after her and since 1991 the University has held an annual lecture series in her name. Speakers have included Ruth Cracknell, Barry Humphries, Carmen Lawrence, Hilary McPhee, Pat Dodson and Robert Drewe.

As Riemer wrote in his obituary, "Everyone who knew her has a favourite Elizabeth Jolley story". He continues, later in the obituary, to say that "Jolley could assume any one of several personas - the little old lady, the Central European intellectual, the nurse, the orchardist, the humble wife, the university teacher, the door-to-door salesperson - at the drop of a hat, usually choosing one that would disconcert her listeners, but hold them in fascination as well".

She developed dementia in 2000, and died in a nursing home in Perth in 2007. Her death prompted many tributes in newspapers across Australia, and in The Guardian in the U.K. Her diaries, stored at the Mitchell Library, NSW, will be closed until after the deaths of her children or 25 years after her death.

On 16 November 2007, the performance of Brahms' Ein deutsches Requiem by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, chorus and soloists, under conductor Lothar Zagrosek, was dedicated to Jolley, for whom the Requiem had been a great source of joy and inspiration.