with the lives of the characters in the story that Miss Porch is making up as she goes along.

In Foxybaby, Jolley’s mixing of the poignant and the ridiculous gets full play. Many of her books contain this element, which may startle, disturb, and even shock. Jolley’s awareness of the comic side of tragedy is one of her most distinctive trademarks.

Jolley enables her readers to participate in her fiction, as do the characters in Foxybaby. Her works often have open endings, enabling the reader to create his or her own resolution to the story. This device, according to the author, “leaves the reader with something to hope for.” This method may initially puzzle and dissatisfy readers, but once they realize what Jolley is doing and why, their enjoyment and entertainment grow as they are allowed—in fact, invited—to take part in the story in an active, imaginative way. The novel Cabin Fever uses many of the devices and techniques described above—the lonely, bewildered, entrapped main character; the shifting of time from one dimension to another; narration in the form of dialogue and interior monologue; and the entirely open ending.

In “Self Portrait,” a kind of epilogue to a collection of her stories, Jolley explained why the theme of exile was important to her, detailing some of her earliest memories. Her mother had come from Austria shortly after World War I. Jolley recalls her mother’s contempt for England, which she had imagined as being composed of castles and country estates, but which instead was urban, industrial, dirty, and mean. “Perhaps my vicarious experience of homesickness and exile started, without any knowledge or understanding, from the early memories of incomprehensible unhappiness,” Jolley wrote.

Being sent away to boarding school at the age of eleven made her an outsider and exile as well. Other experiences—in training hospitals, in her newly adopted country, in her varied kinds of work—intensified her feelings of isolation. “Perhaps the writer,” Jolley wrote, “in writing, overcomes and accepts feelings of exclusion.” She insisted that she did not write about people she had known or events she had witnessed, but clearly her experiences colored her attitudes, just as her omnivorous reading led to her love of the English language, which she used in a spare, straightforward, seemingly simple and artless style. In her memories and in her manila folders, Jolley stored the images of coal mines, the Cotswolds, the Scottish moors, and her Australian surroundings. She felt that encountering and accepting strange territory was a necessary part of learning to be a writer.

In any appraisal of twentieth century fiction, Jolley is judged as one of the leading fiction writers of the last quarter of the twentieth century. On her death in 2007, she was compared to such notable authors as Flannery O’Connor, Edgar Allan Poe, Evelyn Waugh, and Barbara Pym.

“The Performance”

First published: 1979 (collected in The Travelling Entertainer, and Other Stories, 1979)

Type of work: Short story

In a hospital for the emotionally ill, a troubled man tells a sympathetic fellow patient about his life without realizing how much love and selflessness his story reveals about him.

“The Performance” is included in the collection The Travelling Entertainer, and Other Stories. Jolley wrote and published many short stories before her first novel, Palomino, found a publisher; by then she was a popular writer of short fiction. Her stories have appeared in more than twenty anthologies.

“The Performance” contains many of the elements that are characteristic of Jolley’s writing. To begin, she uses a framing device: a narrator who is ostensibly recounting the tale told to him by a confused, anxious man who has just been admitted to the hospital. The narrator tells just enough about himself to give the reader some understanding of his personality and the trouble that has brought him to the hospital (to be “cured” of homosexuality). The way the narrator responds to the man is a kind of performance, a term that is used again and again with a number of meanings; it is the central metaphor of the story.

The structure of the story is also typical of Jolley. The man does not recount events in strict sequence but skips around in time, with one memory reminding him of another. Jolley weaves her story as if it were made up of different strands of yarn—the present, the recent past, the distant past, and the present again, with several permutations of this pattern. It is not until the end of the story that the narrator begins to get a glimmer of understanding of what the man has been trying to tell him.

First, the man talks about his conviction that every work carries its own measure of responsibility, a key idea in the story. Little by little, in a confused and troubled way, he tells of his wife, Charmian, who is a teacher, one who gets ready to teach as if she were preparing for a performance. She is young, full of vitality and excitement, but the man realizes that she thinks of him as “dilapidated, a derelict.” He is only fifty-one, but because his wife treats him like an old man, he feels like one. He is a postman who is having trouble delivering the mail before darkness falls, so he begins to hide it and lose it.

Formerly, the man was a farmer, and he tells of the terrible time when his mother was killed by a branch that he was cutting. He naturally felt responsible. He deeply misses the farm that he once owned. Sometimes he goes back to the deserted place, saying that his feelings “exceed the boundaries of any possible performance.” In addition to his wife, his children live as if their lives were a performance, a competition.

Finally, he tells of a poor, very old woman, rumored to be a witch, who used to ask him every day if he had a letter for her from her son in England. The letter finally arrived, but the old woman was no longer able to comprehend, inhabiting a crazy world of her own until she was run over and crushed by a car. The man feels responsible because he did not look out for her, as he felt responsible for his mother’s death, and as he feels responsible for meeting his wife’s need for him to be an audience, even though she no longer loves him. Despite the complex structure of the story, it has perfect clarity and coherence, with a strongly delineated main character and an underlying tone of deep disappointment and courage.

As in much of Jolley’s work, the ending is open. It is left to the reader to imagine what will happen to the man. He has told his new friend a tale of exile, loneliness, sorrow, and despair. His own story is a kind of performance. Yet his words are so simple and his feelings so strong that the reader is left pondering the possibilities that remain for this kindly, selfless, extremely likable man.

Miss Peabody’s Inheritance

First published: 1983

Type of work: Novel

A spinster’s dull, grim life is transformed when she begins a correspondence with a writer who sends her pages from her novel-in-progress, leading to a confusion between reality and fantasy.

Miss Peabody’s Inheritance is Elizabeth Jolley’s fourth novel. It was an instant critical and popular success, being short-listed for the New South Wales Premier’s Prize, a signal achievement even though it did not win the top award.

Dorothy Peabody is a sixtyish typist in a large London firm, where she has worked for almost forty years. Her uneventful life is a dreary round of caring for her demanding, bedridden mother, riding a train to London, working mindlessly all day, taking another train home, and repeating the previous night’s chores of getting her mother ready for the night, after the neighbor who cared for her during the day has departed.

Nothing varies this dull existence until Dorothy writes an adulatory letter to an Australian writer named Diana Hopewell, author of Angels on Horseback, a trashy romance with vaguely erotic undertones that Dorothy does not understand. Astoundingly, Miss Hopewell replies, describing her exciting life on a beautiful farm, interspersing pages from her work-in-progress, and asking Dorothy about her personal life. A lively correspondence ensues, and Dorothy’s depressing life becomes exciting and suspenseful as she looks forward to receiving the letters and answering them.

The novel has multiple narrators, none of them reliable, as Jolley uses the novel-within-a-novel structure to tell three separate stories—what Miss Hopewell tells of her life, what Dorothy replies, and the excerpts from Diana’s book about three middle-aged unmarried ladies of very respectable demeanor in public but dubious morals in private. The three women embark on their annual holiday in Europe, encumbered by a shy, motherless sixteen-year-old girl who has nowhere to go when school is closed for vacation (one of the ladies being a headmistress).

The sections dealing with the three women and their young companion are written in the present tense, giving the reader a sense of actuality and immediacy. As Dorothy Peabody reads and rereads these sections, she gradually comes to believe that what she is reading is actually happening. As fantasy impinges on her own life, she begins to behave in ways that are totally unlike her. The sudden death of her mother hardly creates a ripple in her routine, to which she has added joining the office workers in their Friday gatherings at a nearby pub. Not surprisingly, Dorothy cannot handle alcohol, and her behavior at these social affairs becomes more and more erratic and weird, culminating in an arrest for drunkenness. As a result, Mr. Bains, second-in-command at the office, offers Dorothy a three-month holiday, believing that the death of her mother has deranged her.

Dorothy has been looking for the three women friends, who are supposed to be winding up their holiday in London. When she fails to find them and realizes that they are probably on their way home now, she accepts Mr. Bains’s offer and embarks for Australia to visit her novelist friend. On the plane, she writes her last letter to her friend. The next scene reveals that Diana Hopewell has just died, in the middle of a sentence. There is no beautiful ranch, just a nursing home and a kindly matron who consoles Dorothy in her disappointment, which does not last long. She realizes that she need not make the effort to go to see Diana’s farm. All she needs to do is get hold of a typewriter, gather up the pages of the novel that Miss Hopewell bequeathed to her, and “enter into her inheritance.”

“So much depends in the writing of a novel,” Diana Hopewell had written, “on the impact of the imagination on someone else.” In this sentence, Jolley states clearly the controlling idea of the novel about Miss Peabody. Earlier in the story, Diana had written to Dorothy, “If you feel emotionally involved that is natural. . . . The writing is packed, it is dense writing, emotions on several levels packed in. It is, I hope, a novel of existence and feeling. A reader can be as involved as he wishes and some readers will fight off this involvement. Don’t worry. Read on.” Obviously Miss Hopewell’s is not the only novelist’s voice speaking.

In this early novel, as in those that followed, Jolley aims to involve the reader who is willing to participate in the novel, and she demonstrates her ability to gather the reader into the story so that such involvement is possible. Again, the ending is open. Will Miss Peabody finish the novel or will she sink into dementia? One cannot help wondering as well about those improbably respectable women and the young girl who shocked them by falling in love with, and becoming engaged to, the elderly father of one of her schoolmates.

Cabin Fever

First published: 1990

Type of work: Novel

An eminent psychological consultant is unable to leave her hotel room on the twenty-fourth floor as she relives her troubled and miserable past.

In Cabin Fever, Jolley recounts the life of a young woman named Vera Wright. Telling the story entirely from the point of view of the first-person narrator, Jolley explores the nature of memory, as she has done in many of her novels. In this book she shows her mastery of the narrative devices she has developed, as well as the natural, straightforward style that is characteristic of her writing.

The book opens in the present, with Vera Wright sitting in her room on the twenty-fourth floor of a hotel in New York, where she is scheduled to deliver a paper at a conference entitled “Perspectives on Moral Insanity.” Other papers listed in the program include “Symptoms of Panic Disorder” and “New Discoveries About Diabetes and Anorexia.” Vera appears to be suffering from some of the symptoms that she is supposed to objectively discuss at this conference of physicians, psychiatrists, social workers, nurses, and other health care workers. She knows that she should be meeting and talking with her fellow conferees, but instead she seems to be paralyzed by memories: her parents, her friends at the hospital where she trained to be a nurse, her first lover, and various people for whom she worked while trying to rear her daughter. These jobs include assisting in a home for new mothers, working in a progressive boarding school, and finally acting as a live-in housekeeper for a fifty-eight-year-old professor and his much older sister.

The foregoing summary suggests a neat, chronological succession of characters and incidents, but the story is told in the way that memory works. As Jolley herself writes: “The revival,” (of persons, places, incidents), “is not in any particular order, and one recalled picture, attaching itself to another, is not recognizably connected to another in spite of its being brought to the surface in the wake of the first recollection.” Thus the story is told in a circuitous fashion, with no semblance of chronological order, and yet, because the main components of Vera’s life are mentioned and described and dramatized through dialogue and her own musings, the story begins to be clear and the experiences she underwent are gradually made comprehensible.

Vera’s parents are major figures in her memory. Her mother is a disappointed, critical, anxious woman, while her father is gentle, loving, and kind. (Jolley described her own parents in much the same way.) Two other important people are Dr. Jonathon Metcalf and his wife Magda, who use Vera for their own perverted and selfish pleasure, though she never seems to realize this.

Aside from the remembered (and one suspects sometimes imagined) conversations, the entire story consists of interior monologue and recollections, through which the reader comes to admire Vera’s courage, determination, naïveté, and humor.

The book ends as it began, with Vera still self-imprisoned in her hotel room. She remembers (or imagines?) talking to someone coming to keep an appointment that they “take the path through the pines from the station. It is both a shortcut and a pleasant little walk. A remedy.” These are the last words in the book, leaving the reader to ponder. While much of the novel seems clear enough, many questions remain unanswered. There is, for example, an untold part to Vera’s story—how she overcame her poverty and helplessness, acquired the education necessary to become an important personage in her field, and reached the stature of one to whom “people come to consult . . . about what worries them.” Are the woman in the hotel room and the young Vera Wright the same person? In the early pages of the book, the narrator remarks, “a ruthless self-examination is needed.” This idea is not clearly connected to what precedes or follows it, yet it seems to be a related and significant clue to what the book is about.

Jolley invites the reader to participate in the story, to allow one’s own imagination and insight to operate in a collaboration with the author, adding speculation and reflection to enhance the overall effect of the novel.

The Well

First published: 1986

Type of work: Novel

Hester Harper, a lame spinster who cares for her ailing father, brings Katherine, an orphan, into her father’s house to live with them. Following the father’s death, the two women become involved in a bizarre, almost supernatural, event.

Hester Harper has a distinct limp. She leads an isolated existence on the farm of her father, who when the story opens is an old man. He soon dies. Perhaps to relieve her isolation and loneliness, possibly for more arcane reasons, such as a suppressed lesbianism, she brings an orphan, Katherine, into her father’s house. Jolley often wrote about people who have lost their mothers, as she had lost hers.

When Hester’s father dies, she and Katherine continue to live together in his house. They have a compatible relationship, but it is somewhat compromised by a fantastic event. The two women have gone to a dance and are on their way home following it. Hester is driving, and in the darkness she runs down something in the road, presumably a man. The two women, unnerved by what has happened, dump the limp object Hester has run down into a well that is no longer used as a source of water. It becomes a symbol of suppressed sexuality.

Jolley depicts with incredible detail and psychological accuracy the panic, verging on hysteria, the two women experience after this traumatic occurrence. After dropping the object into the well, Hester then concludes that they have hit a man who has stolen money from her. She thereupon orders Katherine to descend into the well to retrieve her missing money.

Katherine refuses to go down into the well. She tells Hester that the man they have disposed of is still alive. In fact, Katherine has spoken with him, and, in a bizarre twist, he has proposed marriage to her. As in much of Jolley’s writing, reality gives way to fantastic events well outside the normal bounds of reality, but Jolley handles this departure from normality deftly, so that in crossing the line, she does not lose her readers.