Elizabeth Jolley

A haunting and wryly funny tale of memory, desire and loneliness - an Australian classic and winner of the Miles Franklin Award in 1987

Miss Peabody, a lonely spinster in London, writes a fan letter to Diana Hopewell, an Australian novelist. In reply, Hopewell sends installments of her novel-in-progress, the zany adventures of a trio of gently lesbian ladies, a headmistress and two companions, touring Europe with a hapless student. With each mail delivery, Miss Peabody's involvement with the novelist and her characters intensifies until fantasy and reality poignantly merge. "Wonderful . . . gives great pleasure" (New York Times Book Review).

After an unplanned admission to a nursing home, Mr. Scobie must protect himself and his dreams from the soul-killing proprietress, Matron Price. Playing Brahms and reciting Wordsworth is not enough. Yet his very simple riddle and its ordinary answer may change the institution forever. Can a voice calling for dignity be heard? "A satire of great verve and acerbity" (New York Times Book Review), comparable to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

In Foxbaby, Alma Porch, aspiring dramatist, agrees to teach a course in Trinity College's "Better Body Through the Arts" summer program for overweight women. There she's surrounded by starving matrons, orgies of sex and gluttony, and a motley array of staff and students eager to improve their minds and diminish their flesh by acting in her play, Foxybaby.

Edwin Page, a fussy middle-aged professor, no sooner bids farewell to his obstetrician wife, Cecilia, who accepted a fellowship abroad, when his new neighbors, Mrs. Botts and her sexy, twentyish daughter, Leila, arrive. Since they're locked out of their house, Edwin invites them in-and then can't get them to leave. He becomes obsessed with Leila and convinces himself that she is a perfect surrogate mother for the childless Cecilia. "Wickedly amusing . . . subversive" (New York Times Book Review), The Sugar Mother undoes the institution of marriage.

Set in 1940s wartime England, the trilogy follows young Vera, who leaves her cultivated Midlands home to become a nurse in a military hospital and is catapulted into adulthood through unorthodox love entanglements with both men and women, two illegitimate children, and finally emigration to Australia, where, from her new vantage point now a doctor and writer she looks back on her life s journey. Combining the beauty of Virginia Woolf with the spare, heartbreaking insightfulness of Jean Rhys, the trilogy is both a literary tour de force and an accessible, universal portrait of a woman in search of sustaining love. The concluding volume, The Georges Wife, is published here for the first time in the US. The first two volumes have long been out of print. North American readers can now experience the most ambitious and accomplished work in Jolley s oeuvre (J. M. Coetzee).