Elizabeth Jolley - Literary Style and Themes

Literary Style and Themes

Jolley's style comprises an "unusual mixture of ... late-twentieth century modernism ... and a neo-nineteenth century humanism." Bird suggests that this humanism provides "solace for readers whose equilibrium may be threatened by deracinated wit and uncanny narrative techniques."

The characters of Jolley's stories and novels are in varying degrees society's misfits; whether they are old, foreign, lonely, eccentric, poor, or simply regarded as deviant; they are outsiders, dispossessed and diminished. The sadness of their lives is frequently moderated by the inventiveness of their strategies for survival – often described with a mix of wry affection, dark humour and satirical realism. The concept of alienation, displacement or exile is common to most of Jolley's novels.

Jolley said this about finding her characters: "I don't really know. I suppose I must see something, I might see somebody in a shop, doing something, taking something or choosing something and that interests me. And I then might go home and make a note about it. Miss Thorne in Miss Peabody's Inheritance, I actually saw at a dinner party. Well, it was a buffet dinner, really, not where you sit around a table. I never spoke to the woman, but she was sitting on the floor in a navy blue frock, a very big pile of dark hair, a very powerful woman. That kind of thing will give me a character"

Her characters often inhabit various forms of prisons – a gothic boarding house in Milk and Honey, a maternity home in Cabin Fever, an isolated farm in Palomino and The Well. Stories developed by Jolley usually centred on the protagonists' bizarre methods of coping and gritty convictions of significance.

Riemer suggests that her father's side "must have been held responsible for her wry sense of the subterranean anarchy of rigidly controlled British (and Australian) institutions - hospitals, boarding schools and old-age homes - which she evoked memorably in novel after novel" and that her Austrian heritage accounted for "her often nighmarish imagination and certainly for her fascination with German-language culture, the snippets of Goethe and Schubert lieder that crop up throughout her work".

Jolley commented that she was interested in the individual's particular form of loneliness or fear, which imposes life on the fringe. "I suppose I'm interested to explore the inside of people's survival – bitter knowledge, grief and unwanted realization often go side by side with acceptance, love and hope." Cruelty, emotional manipulation, territorial aggression and financial exploitation are also natural to a great many of her characters, and her underlying view of the human condition – although counterpointed somewhat with empathy and compassion – is necessarily bleak.

While Jolley is often thought of as a primarily urban writer, many of her works - particularly Palomino, The Newspaper of Claremont Street, The Well, and her nonfictional Diary of a Weekend Farmer - are "intensely permeated with the landscape" and include women farmers who choose to farm their land.

Her books are often interconnected by characters who appear again or in almost identical form in other novels, and certain incidents and situations recur in many of her stories – although the responses to these situations are varied and drawn out in different ways amongst different texts. Helen Garner writes about this quality in her writing: "She will take a situation, a relationship, a moment of insight, a particular longing, and work on it in half a dozen different versions, making the characters older or younger, changing their gender or their class, gaoling or releasing a father, adding or subtracting a murder or a suicide; and these repetitions and reusings, conscious but not to the point of being orchestrated, set up a pattern of echoes which unifies the world, and is most seductive and comforting".

Garner also comments on the humour in Jolley's writing: "Elizabeth Jolley is a very funny writer ... she is droll, sly, often delicate ... she is offhand, with a batty sideways slip that I find hilarious".

Like other highly original Australian writers such as Patrick White and Les Murray, Elizabeth Jolley brought to her writing a profound love and understanding of the Australian climate, landscape, nature and people.