love each other even though they will never again be together.

Mr. Scobie’s Riddle

In the graphic dialogue of Laura’s tenants can be seen the accuracy and the comic vigor that characterize Jolley’s later works. Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, for example, begins with a series of communications between the matron of the nursing home where the novel takes place and the poorly qualified night nurse, whose partial explanations and inadequate reports, along with her erratic spelling, infuriate her superior. At night, the nursing home comes alive with pillow fights, medicinal whiskey, and serious gambling, at which the matron’s brother, a former colonel, always loses. In the daytime, the home is a prison: Old people are processed like objects, ill fed and poorly tended by two rock-and-rolling girls, and supervised by the greedy matron, whose goal is to part her new guest, Mr. Scobie, from his property. If the patients are prisoners, however, so are their supervisors. Having lost her husband to an old schoolmate, the matron cannot ignore the fact that the couple cavort regularly in the caravan on the grounds; in turn, the lonely matron saddles her schoolmate with as much work as possible. Meanwhile, the matron is driven constantly closer to bankruptcy by her brother’s gambling and closer to a nervous breakdown by her inefficient and careless employees.

Some of the most poignant passages in Mr. Scobie’s Riddle deal with the yearnings of two old men in Room One, who wish only to return to their homes. Unfortunately, the home of one has been sold and demolished; that of the other has been rented by a voracious niece and nephew. As the patients are driven toward their deaths, no one offers rescue or even understanding. There are, however, some triumphs. The would-be writer, Miss Hailey, never surrenders her imagination or her hope; ironically, her schoolfellow, the matron, who has taken all her money, must at last turn to Miss Hailey for understanding and companionship. In the battle for his own dignity, Mr. Scobie wins. Even though he is returned to the nursing home whenever he attempts to go home, and even though his uncaring niece and nephew finally acquire his beloved home, he wins, for he never surrenders to the matron, dying before she can bully him into signing over his property.

Miss Peabody’s Inheritance

The unique combination of farcical humor, lyrical description, pathos, and moral triumph that marks Jolley’s later work is also exemplified in Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, published, like Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, in 1983. In this novel, a woman writer is one of the two major characters. In response to a fan letter from Miss Peabody, a middle-aged, mother-ridden London typist, the novelist regularly transmits to her the rough episodes from her new novel, a Rabelaisian story of lesbian schoolmistresses and the troublesome, innocent girl whom they escort through Europe. When at last the typist travels to Australia to meet her writer-heroine, she finds that the writer, a bedridden invalid, has died. Her courage, her imagination, and her manuscript remain for Miss Peabody, however, an inheritance that will enable her to live as fully and as creatively as the novelist.

Milk and Honey

In Milk and Honey, there is no triumph of love, of laughter, or of the imagination. Alone among Jolley’s novels, Milk and Honey begins and ends in despair. At the beginning, a door-to-door salesman with a poor, unhappy wife expresses his loneliness, his loss of the woman he loved and of the music he enjoyed. The rest of the novel re-creates his life, from the time when he went to live with his cello teacher and his seemingly delightful family, through the salesman’s discovery that he was used and betrayed, to the final tragicclimax, when his income vanished—his cellist’s hand was charred in a fire—and the woman who made his life worth living was brutally murdered. Many of the scenes in the novel are grotesque, but they are devoid of the humor that is typical of Jolley and that often suggests one way of rising above despair. Nor does the protagonist’s art—here, performing music rather than creating fiction—enable him to transcend his situation. His love for his wife is destroyed with his illusions about her, his mistress is destroyed by his wife, and he and his wife are left to live out their lives together without love.

Foxybaby

Foxybaby, published in 1985, is as grotesque as Milk and Honey, but its characters move through desperation to humor, love, imagination, and hope. The setting is a campus turned into a weight-loss clinic. As is typical in Jolley’s novels, the characters are trapped there, in this case by a rascally bus driver who ensures a healthy tow truck and garage business by parking so that all approaching cars plow into him. The central character of Foxybaby is, once again, a woman writer, Alma Porch, who, along with a sculptor and a potter, has been hired to take the residents’ minds off food by submerging them in culture. Miss Porch’s mission is to rehearse an assorted group of residents in a film that she is creating as the book progresses. Brilliantly, Jolley alternates the wildly comic events at the campus with the poignant story that Miss Porch is writing, an account of a father’s attempt to rescue his young, drug-ruined, infected daughter and her sickly baby from the doom that awaits them. From his affectionate nickname for her when she was a little girl comes the name of the book.

Like the love story in Milk and Honey, the plot in Foxybaby illustrates the destructive power of love. Well-meaning though he is, the father cannot establish communication with his daughter. The reason is unclear, even to the writer who is creating the story—or, more accurately, is letting the characters she has imagined create their own story. Perhaps the father’s love was crushing; perhaps in her own perverseness the daughter rejected it. At any rate, it is obvious that despite his persistence, he is making little headway in reaching the destructive stranger who is now his “Foxybaby” and who herself has a baby for whom she feels nothing.

Meanwhile, like Jolley’s other protagonists, Porch considers escaping from the place that is both her prison and her exile but is prevented from doing so by the very confusion of events. Loquacious Jonquil Castle moves in with her; Maybelle Harrow, with her lover and his lover, invites her to an orgy; and the indomitable Mrs. Viggars brings forth her private stock of wine and initiates Porch into the joys of the school-like midnight feast. Offstage, the bus driver is always heard shouting to his wife or his mistress to drop her knickers. Love, in all its variety, blooms on the campus, while it is so helpless in the story being shaped in the same place.

Although the campus trap will be easier to escape, bus or no bus, than the nursing home in Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, Jolley stresses the courage of the residents, a courage that will be necessary in the lives to which they will return, whether those lives involve battling boredom and loneliness, like Miss Porch’s; or rejection, like that of Jonquil Castle, the doting mother and grandmother; or age and the loss of love, like the lascivious Maybelle Harrow’s. Just as they will survive the clinic, though probably without losing any weight, they will survive their destinies. At the end of the novel, there is a triumph of love, when Mrs. Viggars, admitting her loneliness, chooses to take a young woman and her three children into her home in order to establish a family once again. There is also a triumph of imagination, when Miss Porch actually sees the characters whom she has created. For her loneliness, they will be companions.

At the end of the novel, the bus stops and Miss Porch awakes to find herself at the school. Jolley does not explain: Has Porch dreamed the events of the book? Will they now take place? Or is the awakening misplaced in time, and have they already taken place? Ultimately, it does not matter. What does matter is the power of the imagination, which, along with humor and love, makes life bearable.

The Well

Hester Harper, another spinster protagonist, is somewhat like the doctor in Palomino in that she lives on an isolated ranch in Western Australia and yearns for love. In The Well, however, the beloved is an orphan girl whom Hester takes home to be her companion. Refusing to admit her sexual desires, even to herself, Hester persuades herself that her feelings are merely friendly or perhaps maternal; yet she is so jealous of the orphan, Katherine, that she cannot bear to think of the friend who wishes to visit her or of the man who will ultimately take her away.

The rival, when he appears, is mysterious, perhaps a thief, perhaps only an animal, whom Katherine hits with her car on a late-night drive and whom Hester immediately buries in the well. Perhaps diabolical, perhaps distraught, Katherine insists that he is calling to her, demanding her love, threatening her and Hester. Although at last his voice is stilled, it is clear that Hester has lost control over Katherine, to whom the outside world of sexuality and adventure is calling with undeniable urgency. Unlike the doctor in Palomino, Hester cannot be contented with the memory of love. Imagination, however, once again mitigates the horror of life; at the end of the novel, Hester is making the mysterious nighttime adventure into a story to be told to children.

The Georges’ Wife

The Georges’ Wife is the third volume in a semiautobiographical trilogy that many critics feel represents Jolley’s highest achievement. In My Father’s Moon and Cabin Fever, Jolley drew on her own experiences to describe the life of her heroine, Vera Wright, as a schoolgirl and as a young nurse during wartime; in The Georges’ Wife, like Jolley herself, Vera emigrates to Australia. In this final book of the trilogy, the author repeats the themes of discord and harmony—between brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, friends and lovers—that she introduced earlier. Again her spare prose is a dramatic contrast to the abundance of compassion and understanding she demonstrates for the complexities of human relationships. Focusing on the relationship between Vera and Mr. George, Jolley explores the life they attempt to create together, while Vera’s mind continues to wander to her past and to her fear of repeating the past. The present and the past collide within her, just as the desire for peace collides with the reality of disharmony.

The Orchard Thieves

A similar theme of discord versus harmony is present in The Orchard Thieves. Characters in this novel are also haunted by times of discord that destroy their desire for calm. Every member of the household deals with this specter, especially the grandmother, a mother of three grown-up daughters, who understands that the unspoken and unrevealed either perplex or console people in their dealings with family. A middle sister returns home from England with no explanations about her private life, thus jeopardizing the peace in the grandmother’s house. In the face of this danger, the grandmother tries to rescue the situation and the people involved through her imagination, acceptance, and affection.

The title for this novel, the first part of which was originally published in The New Yorker in 1994 as “Three Miles to One Inch,” is taken from a quotation from writer Herman Melville: “The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us.” Uncomfortable inflictions do indeed intrude into the lives of Jolley’s characters, especially those in this household.

Lovesong

Another tale about uncomfortable inflictions is Lovesong, a novel that explores another of Jolley’s exiles, Thomas Dalton, who comes reluctantly to Mrs. Porter’s establishment, a “Home Away from Home for Homeless Gentlemen.” He wants a fresh start, as does Miss Emily Vales, a fellow lodger and recipient of the predictions found in Mrs. Porter’s tea leaves. The study of these two wayfarers, typical examples of Jolley’s characters who are struggling with their human mixture of pathos and nobility, echoes the same struggle poet T. S. Eliot describes in his own love song, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917).

An Accommodating Spouse

The title character in An Accommodating Spouse is Hazel Carpenter, who has turned out to be just the kind of wife that Lady Delaware Carpenter once told her son he needed. Hazel’s primary goal in life is to attend to the needs and wants of her husband Professor Delaware Carpenter. In this mission, Hazel is aided by her identical twin, Chloë, who lives with the couple. After his triplet daughters were born, the professor grew accustomed to basking in the girls’ admiration, though he left most of their care to his wife and his sister-in-law. With his household so well ordered, the professor can spend his time inventing witticisms that will impress the students in his English classes, contemplating how to arrange a sexual liaison with his female colleague Dr. Florence, wondering whether or not her friend and housemate Shirley Bianca is her lesbian lover, and, at moments of boredom, as when he must sit in a faculty meeting, imagining himself into a more interesting time and place, perhaps the Middle Ages. Hazel is so malleable that she does not even mind lending her husband for a night to Dr. Florence and Ms. Bianca, who have chosen him to be the father of their babies. However, the women decide on the less messy alternative of weekend adoption, and, as might be expected, it is Hazel who mothers the twin boys whom the women choose.

Everyone is looking forward to the return of the triplets, who have been traveling abroad, for a celebration of their twenty-first birthday. Though the professor recalls that as teenagers they displayed both unseemly language and an amazing knowledge of sexual matters, he invents his own scenario for their return, which will begin with the birthday party but will culminate in an elegant and perfectly conventional triple wedding. However, when the triplets do arrive, with an unpleasant wheelchair-bound male in tow, they are not the young ladies their father had imagined. They shout, swear, and storm through the house, flinging their clothes about, ignoring domestic schedules, and even taking over their father’s bathroom.

The birthday party is a disaster. The triplets’ friends, who turn out to be vegetarians, scorn the expensive spread that Hazel has provided, and she has to order in food that they will eat. Late in the evening, the professor stations himself outside the upstairs bathroom door, which has been locked for some time. Suddenly the door bursts open, and a naked Ms. Bianca emerges, with a cameraman in hot pursuit. Inside the bathroom the professor sees his daughters, clad only in bubble bath, being photographed by another cameraman; they are soon joined by the former invalid, also naked and in obvious good health. Seeing her husband’s discomfort, Hazel puts him in a taxi and sends him to Dr. Florence. When he returns the next day, satiated, the professor notices that Hazel has been crying, and he realizes that he has been the cause of all the unhappiness she has felt over the years. However, as the novel ends there is no hint that either of them will change. Hazel will continue to make herself the professor’s slave, and he will continue to contemplate his every feeling and to indulge his every desire without ever realizing that obsessive self-examination is merely self-indulgence unless it results in real transformation.

Because her works deal with cruelty, indifference, lust, greed, and, above all, loneliness, Elizabeth Jolley cannot be considered a superficial writer. The great distances of her western Australia become a metaphor for the mysterious expanses of time; the small clumps of isolated individuals, trapped together on a ranch, on a weight-loss farm, or in a nursing home, represent society, as do Joseph Conrad’s microcosmic ships on an indifferent ocean. Jolley makes it clear that love is infrequent and imperfect, that childhood is endangered by cruelty, and that old age leads through indignity to death, yet most of her works are enlivened by comic characters who defy destiny and death by their very insistence on living. Some of her characters transcend their isolation by learning to love, such as the doctor in Palomino or Mrs. Viggars in Foxybaby. Others, such as Miss Peabody and Miss Porch, triumph through their imaginations. There is redemption in nature, whether in the beauty of palomino horses or the sunlit shore where Miss Porch sees her characters. There is also triumph in the isolated courage of a human being such as Mr. Scobie, who defies institutionalized and personal greed to save the beloved home to which he can return only in memory. There is also much to be said for kindness, the quality that even her narcissistic husband has to admit enables Hazel Carpenter to heal any wound the world inflicts. If Jolley’s characters are mixtures of the pathetic, the grotesque, and the noble, it is because they are human; if her stories keep the reader off balance with confusion, laughter, and tears, it is because they reflect life.