Jessica Anderson - Starting Too Late

Starting Too Late

Anderson was by no means alone in her late emergence onto the literary stage: Geordie Williamson notes that several of Anderson’s Australian female contemporaries including Elizabeth Jolley, Olga Masters, and Amy Witting did not begin publishing until they had reached retirement age. He suggests that each of these women was constrained largely by material circumstances, including “the demands of family and work, lack of financial independence, an indifferent publishing environment.” When discussing her career, Anderson was quite clear about where her duties lay: “When I was married, and writing at home (writing was my second job; my first was the house) … I never craved to be out in the workplace." He suggests that, as well as adverse material circumstances, Anderson’s career was delayed, and her success mitigated by modesty and a certain “diffidence regarding her gifts.” In her own essay entitled “Starting Too Late,” Anderson complains that “they are unwilling servants, those skills we learn too late.” She would perhaps have described success as such a skill. When asked about how winning awards had affected her life, she replied that:

…it’s encouraging to win a prize. But the success of Tirra Lirra, plus the prize it won and the two prizes The Impersonators won, made me feel less private and more vulnerable, and I had to get over that in order to go on at all. I had never been interviewed before, or I had never been asked to be interviewed, and suddenly I had all these interviews. It was a challenge I found hard to meet. I almost wished I had kept writing under a pseudonym as I had begun…

In spite of her late start, Anderson’s career as a novelist spanned three decades during which she produced eight critically acclaimed works. Of these, unfortunately, only Tirra Lirra by the River remains in print.