Literary Style and Themes
In an interview in 1964, Langley described her writing process as "embroidery of literature" and saw herself as "one who chatters and embroiders all the time, endlessly, a great fantasy of romance". McLeod describes her as "a subtle, ironic and complex novelist" and says that her best voice is "sometimes lyrical, sometimes cynical, with a marvellous descriptive flair and an ear for dialogue".
Makowiecka suggests that Langley's novels - published and unpublished - fall into two groups. The first group - The Pea-Pickers, White Topee, Wild Australia, The Victorians and Bancroft House - "reconfigures her life in Gippsland, intermingling this story with those of the bushmen and women of the 1880s, and further embellishing her text with poems, playlets, songs and paeans of praise addressed to ancient gods and mythical lands". The second group - all unpublished - cover her departure for and life in New Zealand. In them she again entwines her stories, but "now with apparently current and factual journal entries tangled in the genre-blurring tapestry of poetry, fantasy and multi-faceted subjectivity".
Makiowiecka also states that time, memory and land are regularly revisited in her writing. She writes of time both in terms of a large historical perspective and the more personal quotidian one. She explores the processes of memory and that which is remembered, and how this is incorporated into the mind and thence into immortality. She calls the land "'sacred earth' of western antiquity, and ... of an equally mythic 'Australia'" and writes that she "picked up a new piece of mind from every piece of different landscape I saw". In other words, "as she rides and writes, is creating herself in a self-creating landscape". In her writing time, memory and the land are entwined in such a way that they affect and are affected by each other.
Read more about this topic: Eve Langley
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