Writer, born in Birmingham, West Midlands, C England, UK. She was educated at a Quaker boarding school in Birmingham, trained as a nurse, moved to Perth, Western Australia in 1959, and has lived there ever since, working in a variety of occupations as a nurse, orchardist, and teacher. Her first book was a volume of short stories, Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories (1976), which she followed with Mr Scobie's Riddle (1982, Age Book of the Year Award), Miss Peabody's Inheritance (1983), The Well (1986), My Father's Moon (1989), and Cabin Fever (1990). She has an eye for eccentric, incongruous, and ridiculous characters and situations, but the underlying moral tone is serious and can be disturbing. She keeps a farm for fruit and geese, and is also a prolific writer of radio plays and poetry.
Elizabeth Jolley AO (born 1923) is a popular Australian author notable in Australian literature for her series of critically acclaimed novels based upon the alienated characters and the nature of loneliness and entrapment.
Early life
Elizabeth Jolley was born in Birmingham, England of an English father and Viennese mother;
Literature career
Jolley began writing early in her twenties, but was not recognized or published until much later. 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.
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. In 1986, The Well won the top Australian literary prize - the Miles Franklin Award.
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. 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 1980's and 1990's.
Elizabeth Jolley was awarded the Canada/Australia Literary Award in 1989, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Western Australia Institute of Technology in 1987.
She continued to publish novels, short stories, and a work of autobiography.
Literary Style
The characters of Jolley's stories and novels are in varying degrees society's misfits;
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.
Jolley comments that she is interested in the individual's particular form of loneliness or fear, which imposes life on the fringe.
Her books are often interconnected by characters who appear again or in almost identical form in other novels, and certain incidences and situations recur in many of her stories - although the responses to these situations is are varied and drawn out in different ways amongst different texts.
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