Elizabeth Jolley - Literary Career

Literary Career

Jolley began writing early in her twenties, but was not recognized until much later. She had many rejections by publishers, 39 in one year alone. Delys Bird suggests that it was the post-modern features of her writing - "motifs repeated within and between novels and short stories, self-reflexivity and open-endedness" - that made it hard for them to be published at that time. She suggests that her eventual success owes a little to "the 1980s awareness of 'women's writing'".

In the 1960s some of her stories were accepted by the BBC World Service and Australian journals, but her first book Five Acre Virgin was not published until 1976. Soon following were Woman in a Lampshade and Palomino, but it would not be until much later that these books would receive either positive reviews or high circulation.

She lapsed in her writing, discouraged by earlier failures, and was only to be published again in 1983 with Miss Peabody's Inheritance and Mr Scobie's Riddle. The latter won The Age Book of the Year and high acclaim, especially in Australia and the United States. A year later, Milk and Honey was awarded Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards. In 1986, The Well won the top Australian literary prize - the Miles Franklin Award. The Sugar Mother was, as Riemer writes, "her characteristically idiosyncratic way of fulfilling a commission to write a novel commemorating the bicentenary of 1988".

Later in her career she wrote an autobiographical fiction trilogy, "My Father's Moon", "Cabin Fever" and 'The George's Wife". In an article in The Age newspaper, 20 February 2007, written after her death, literary critic, Peter Craven, was reported as saying, "She was a master of black comedy and she went on to write a wholly different form of autobiographical fiction that was lucid, luminous and calm".

Lovesong, her third last novel, is, Riemer suggests, "the riskiest book she wrote". It deals with the subject of pedophilia and demonstrates "an admirable refusal to be deflected from what she must have seen as the demands of her art and vocation".

In 1993 a diary she kept before her novels were published which recorded the experience of buying a hobby farm was published as Diary of a Weekend Farmer. A partly autobiographical collection of pieces, Central Mischief, appeared in 1992. She also wrote numerous radio plays broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and several of her poetic works were published in journals and anthologies during the 1980s and 1990s.

Jolley was made a Professor of Creative Writing at Curtin University in 1998.

On 8 February 2008, Curtin University Library launched the online Elizabeth Jolley Research Collection, a virtual research centre for scholars interested in studying her and her work.