Eve Langley - Life

Life

Langley was born in Forbes, New South Wales, the eldest daughter of carpenter, Arthur Alexander Langley (died 1915), and his wife Myra, née Davidson, both of whom came from Victoria. Eve's mother was disinherited as the result of her marriage and the family spent much of its life in poverty. After Arthur died, Myra returned to Victoria, initially managing her brother's hotel at Crossover. Eve and her sister June attended several schools in New South Wales and Victoria, including Brunswick Central and Dandenong State Schools, and Dandenong High School.

In the 1920s Eve and her sister worked their way around the countryside of Gippsland as agricultural labourers, which experience forms the base of her first novel The Pea Pickers. In 1932 she followed her mother and sister to New Zealand and in 1937 she married 22-year old art student, Hilary Clark. They had three children: a daughter, Bisi Arilev, and two sons, Langley Rhaviley and Karl Marx. In 1942, her husband had her admitted to Auckland Mental Hospital where she stayed until she was released into her sister's care in 1949. She was divorced in 1952.

Langley worked in Auckland as a book repairer, 1950-1955, and then visited Australia, 1956-1957, where she travelled extensively through the east coast. She travelled to the United Kingdom in 1959-1960 and then returned to New South Wales in 1960, where she remained for the rest of her life, except for one trip to Greece.

Suzanne Falkiner, writing about women writing about the wilderness, suggests that "Those rare women who have deliberately gone into the landscape alone, and not trailing in the tracks of a protective husband - from Daisy Bates in the 1880s to Eve Langley in the 1930s and Robyn Davidson in the 1970s - have often had to combat being considered eccentric, or even mad".

In her latter years she became extremely reclusive, living in a shack in the Katoomba bush in the Blue Mountains. She became increasingly eccentric, wearing 'mannish clothes' and a white topi and always wore a knife in her belt. Dale Spender writes that much has been written of her eccentricities, such as the wearing of trousers, and says that "it is distressing to find that sometimes there is more comment about her eccentricities as a person than about the strengths of her writing". Langley claimed Oscar Wilde as her alter ego, going so far as to officially take that name by deed poll in 1954. Her work presents many clues to her enigmatic life. The manuscripts of ten of her unpublished novels are held among her papers in the Mitchell Library.

Hal Porter wrote in 1965 about many of the writers he had met, and said that "of them all, Eve Langley is the one with whom, on a first meeting, I spent the most dazzling day, enlivened by the unforeseen".

She spent the last years of her life living alone in the Blue Mountains. She died alone at home sometime between 1 and 13 June, but her body was not found until about 3 weeks after her death.