'Over a fifty-year period, from 1944 to 1994, Thea Astley published a number of critical writings, including essays, newspaper articles and reviews, and short reflections and meditations on her craft. Despite a renewed interest in Astley’s work, however, most critical interrogations of her oeuvre focus on her novels, and more recently her poetry. As a result, Astley’s critical writing has not been afforded the same breadth and depth of investigation as her fiction. This lacuna is troubling, since Astley’s critical works are important not only for their insight, but for what they reveal about Astley’s self-representation, and in particular the dual identity that she embodied as both a teacher and a satirist. This article argues that these dual roles emerge clearly in Astley’s essays and in fact are inextricable from many of her works. Further, the tensions between these two personae — Astley as teacher and Astley as satirist — reveal natural overlaps with her imaginative writing, and reflect her changing ideas about fiction writing, literature, and education.' (Publication abstract)
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'Loneliness has driven a young school teacher in a small North Queensland town to form an unlikely relationship with a road worker. Harry is older and more experienced than Elsie, but vulnerable through his possessive love for her.
'In an attempt to escape from him, Elsie obtains a transfer. Her last day in town is spent trying to avoid Harry, fearing the violence of his reaction to her desertion and their inevitable encounter.'
Source: Publisher's blurb (House of Books ed.)
Notes
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Also published in braille and sound recording formats.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Thea Astley’s Modernism of the ‘Deep North’, or on (un)kindness
2019
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Queensland Review , December vol. 26 no. 2 2019; (p. 245-255)'Although she is often perceived as a writer of the local, the rural or the regional, Thea Astley herself notes writing by American modernists as her primary literary influence, and emphasises the ethical value of transnational reading and writing. Similarly, she draws parallels between writing of the American ‘Deep South’ and her own writing of the ‘Deep North’, with a particular focus on the struggles of the racial or cultural outsider. In this article, I pursue Astley’s peculiar blend of these literary genres — modernism, the Gothic and the transnational — as a means of understanding her conceptualisation of kindness and community. Although Astley rejects the necessity of literary community, her writing emphasises instead the value of interpersonal engagement and social responsibility. With a focus on her first novel, Girl with a Monkey (1958), this article considers Astley’s representation of the distinction between community and kindness, particularly for young Catholic women in Queensland in the early twentieth century. In its simultaneous critique of the expectations placed on women and its upholding of the values of kindness and charity, Astley considers our responsibilities in our relations with the Other and with community.' (Publication abstract)
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Double Trouble : The Teacher/Satirist Duality in Thea Astley’s Critical Writings
2019
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Queensland Review , December vol. 26 no. 2 2019; (p. 218-231) -
'A Landscape with Figures' : Thea Astley's Aesthetic
2015
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Studies , vol. 7 no. 2 2015; 'Thea Astley wrote of her first book, ‘It wasn’t intended to be a novel in the strict sense – more a landscape with figures’. Her characteristic landscapes are those of far North Queensland, and, as befits a novelist whose work is pervaded by metaphor, those landscapes take on metaphysical dimensions and, in her later work, historical and political aspects.' (Publication abstract) -
“Yrs Patrick” : Thea Astley’s Brush with Timely Advice on “The Rackety Career of Novel Writing”
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 72 no. 1 2012; (p. 53-65) 'Thea Astley had a difficult relationship with critical responses to her work throughout her entire writing life. Success - early or late career (for she had both) - did little to diminish the wounds she felt were inflicted when a reviewer or critic got to work on her "style". By the mid-1980s there were even some Australian literary scholars who were beginning to endorse Astley's own sense of critical foul play. Elizabeth Perkins wrote of Astley's fiction being the kind of writing which not only "disconcerts enthusiastic readers" but seems to render it "beyond the reach of the more usual modes of criticism" (Perkins 11; 17). Yet until now little has been said about how this state of affairs developed or how Astley, over time, came to deal with it - despite the many re - marks she made in interviews which indicate just how strange her relationship with her public persona as a writer actually was. Astley, for her part, became adept at deflection: her teenage poetry was "a form of acne" (Smith 43); she was "incapable of playing the game of the writertaking- himself-seriously seriously" (Astley, Kunapipi 21); she was just a "bit of a misfit" (Astley, Australian Voices 37) and later, more defensively, "I've worked all my life and I haven't had to time to be in the ghetto de Balmain" (Astley, Sunday Herald 3). One person who had an impact on Astley's self-regard at an early stage in her writing life was Patrick White. The record of the friendship has thus far rested on the evidence of its beginning and ending, detailed in David Marr's biography Patrick White: A life (1991) yet a letter White wrote to Astley in 1961, and which Astley kept from view and from publication in Marr's subsequent collection of White's letters, is a critical new source from which we can interpret the influence of White's mentoring of Astley.' (Author's abstract)
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Thea Astley : Writing in Overpoweringly a Male Dominated Literary World
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Indian Review of World Literature in English , July vol. 6 no. 2 2010; This paper is an attempt to explore different themes in the novels of Thea Astley.(p. 1)
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Untitled
1958
single work
review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 23 August 1958; (p. 13)
— Review of The Sunlit Plain 1958 single work novel ; Girl With a Monkey 1958 single work novel ; Snowball 1958 single work novel -
[Review] The Slow Natives
1966
single work
review
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 26 no. 1 1966; (p. 62-66)
— Review of The Slow Natives 1965 single work novel ; Girl With a Monkey 1958 single work novel ; A Descant for Gossips 1960 single work novel ; The Well Dressed Explorer 1962 single work novel -
Love in Queensland
1958
single work
review
— Appears in: The Bulletin , 20 August vol. 79 no. 4097 1958; (p. 2,58)
— Review of Girl With a Monkey 1958 single work novel -
Fiction Chronicle
1958
single work
review
— Appears in: Meanjin , Summer vol. 17 no. 4 1958; (p. 432-436)
— Review of Girl With a Monkey 1958 single work novel ; The Wide Arch 1958 single work novel -
Girl with a Monkey
1959
single work
review
— Appears in: Overland , Winter no. 15 1959; (p. 48)
— Review of Girl With a Monkey 1958 single work novel -
Thea Astley : A Woman among the Satirists of Post-war Modernity
2003
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Feminist Studies , November vol. 18 no. 42 2003; (p. 261-271) The article examines Astley's early satirical novels, asking the question, what do these early satires on gender relations share with those of her male contemporaries, and where do they differ? Are her suburbs and small towns vehicles for satire and ironies that blame women for the excesses and failures of modernity? Arguing that post-war modernism was a strongly masculinist culture which saw art defined by its distance to everyday life, popular values and middle-class consumerism, Sheridan concludes: 'To the extent that she shared this dominant masculinist aesthetic of the 1950s and 1960s, Astley's satirical stance involved her, inevitably, in a modernist rejection of this feminine modernity as innately trivial, distracting and undermining serious aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual values' (270). -
Thea Astley : Exploring the Centre
2004
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Subverting the Empire : Explorers and Exploration in Australian Fiction 2004; (p. 97-144) -
Local Novelist's Theme is Woman Teacher's Love Affair in the North
1958
single work
column
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 9 August 1958; (p. 2) -
Thea Astley : Writing in Overpoweringly a Male Dominated Literary World
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Indian Review of World Literature in English , July vol. 6 no. 2 2010; This paper is an attempt to explore different themes in the novels of Thea Astley.(p. 1) -
The Multiple Effects of Thea Astley's Fiction
2002
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Hot Iron Corrugated Sky : 100 Years of Queensland Writing 2002; (p. 100-110)
- Queensland,
- Bush,
- 1950s