AustLit

Summer Locke Elliott's story, located in the Blue Mountains in the late 1930s, has as its centre a wealthy, upper-middle-class family, the St Jameses. The focus is on Mrs St James and her daughters Stevie and Bea, as a young man, Angus, becomes a frequent visitor to the household. Like the novel, the screenplay is structured in three parts. Episode 1 ('Angus') is the most Gothic and melodramatic in structure and tone; Episode 2 ('Bea') is the most naturalistic; and Episode 3 ('Eve') is the most concentrated and formally rigorous. Edens Lost is essentially a story of the unsatisfiability of female desire and the inability of the women ever to articulate this desire.