Guest review by Jon Appleton: THE WELL by Elizabeth Jolley

"Wickedly funny, harrowing, mischievous and moving, The Well deserves its status as modern Australian classic."

Jon Appleton is a freelance writer and editor based in London.

‘I don’t want other people coming here poking about in our lives. Kathy I want to tell you this so that we can go on the way we were.’

The 1980s were a fantastic time for Australian women writers. Interest was high: platforms to read and speak abounded in every state, awards and grants liberated authors from teaching loads and other work, colour supplements profiled their lives with each new book. There were even critical books and collections of essays devoted solely to women writers.

No wonder. The standard was dazzling, the personnel intriguingly diverse. There were younger writers like Helen Garner and Kate Grenville, writers embarking on the literary life in their 40s and 50s, like Marion Halligan and Olga Masters, and long-established writers being given new consideration, like Thea Astley, Jessica Anderson and Amy Witting.

Then there was Elizabeth Jolley, something of an outlier.

Jolley was born in Birmingham, in 1923, and migrated to Australia in 1959 with her academic husband and three children. (One of whom had been born within weeks of Mr Jolley’s first wife’s daughter’s birth …) Elizabeth Jolley had a trunkload of manuscripts on arrival which were relentlessly rejected by editors for 15 years until a local press snapped up a collection of short stories, and then another, and then a novel.

After which novels and short story collections poured forth, making her one of the most prolific of all Australian writers, which was a distorted picture as much of the work had been begun, and abandoned, and refashioned, before making it into print. She won award after award and attracted ravishing reviews, domestically and abroad – her books regularly appeared in the UK and America.

On panels, she cut a striking figure – with short, cropped grey hair, she had a clipped, almost girlish voice. She was very tall and habitually wore hippyish skirts and flat sandals. She peered out through squinty spectacles.

I read her stories avidly but if you’ve never encountered her work, here’s a list of reliable ingredients in a work by Elizabeth Jolley.

· Sexual obsession, especially between women

· Fathers and daughters

· Sexual abuse

· Leider music (Jolley’s mother was Viennese)

· The liberating sensation of dance

· Small-town oppression

· Nurses and patients

· Sexual repression, especially in prim, professional women

· The freedom and danger of frontier country

· A novelist’s obsession with their subject material (and its consumption of them)

You’ll find them all in her 1986 novel, The Well, one of Jolley’s best known works, and winner of Australia’s top literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award.

Late in the book, Jolley rallies: ‘She had not come home, at sixteen, from boarding school, in the middle of a term, to keep house for her father, her grandmother having died suddenly, and not learned how to speak to the men.’

The woman in question is Hester Harper, middle-aged or older, fighting to keep control of the only person she has been allowed to love; a feckless, rather vapid social-climber called Kathy, who she takes in from an orphanage – or was it jail? – as a young teenager and with whom she cultivates a totally interdependent life in a remote country town.

But inevitably the outside world encroaches, perhaps most dangerously of all, a young man they strike down whilst driving at night. There are no witnesses, and they pitch the body into an abandoned well on their property. But it turns out he isn’t dead – he’s also a thief - and he joins a throng of men determined to destroy the women’s privacy.

‘She understood too, at once, that she needed to be looked after, cared for, more than ever. She had never felt so afraid and so alone.’

And so resourceful, determined Miss Hester Harper – despite her ailing physical and mental well-being – will stop at nothing to preserve her sanctuary – but at what cost?

Wickedly funny, harrowing, mischievous and moving, The Well deserves its status as modern Australian classic. I’m pleased it’s just been reissued by Virago for today’s readers to enjoy.