Elizabeth Jolley

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EJ , writing in the later twentieth century, was called the most comical and disturbing writer working in Australia today.
Bird, Delys, and Brenda Walker, editors. Elizabeth Jolley: New Critical Essays. Angus and Robertson, 1991.
back-cover
The author of some fifteen novels as well as plays, poetry, and short stories, she commands an adept use of black humour and satire which links her with the comic tradition of Evelyn Waugh , Muriel Spark , and Barbara Pym . Her habitual themes include displacement, confinement, and lesbian love. Her fiction and poetry appeared in Australian, American, and British literary journals, and her work has been translated into Spanish, German, Dutch, French and Greek.

Milestones

4 June 1923
Elizabeth Knight (later EJ ) was born in Birmingham to a Viennese mother and an English father; she was the elder of two girls.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Jolley, Elizabeth. Stories. Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984.
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1960
EJ wrote her earliest published story, A Hedge of Rosemary, in Australia this year.
Joussen, Ulla. “An Interview with Elizabeth Jolley”. Kunapipi, No. 2, pp. 37 -43.
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Jolley, Elizabeth. Stories. Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984.
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By late 1985
In Foxybaby, EJ for the second time used both for comic and metafictional purposes the device of a novel within a novel.
Gilbert, Pam. Coming Out From Under: Contemporary Australian Women Writers. Pandora, 1988.
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OCLC WorldCat.
13 February 2007
EJ died at Perth in Western Australia, after suffering for some years from dementia.
Fox, Margalit. “Elizabeth Jolley, ’Australian Gothic’ Writer, Dies at 83”. The New York Times: Books.

Biography

Birth and Family

4 June 1923
Elizabeth Knight (later EJ ) was born in Birmingham to a Viennese mother and an English father; she was the elder of two girls.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Jolley, Elizabeth. Stories. Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984.
304