AustLit

Eve Langley was born at Forbes, New South Wales, in 1908. She was educated in Forbes and later worked at several jobs in Melbourne before accompanying her sister, June, as an itinerant farm labourer during the 1920s. In 1932 she moved to New Zealand and began work on a novel based on her experiences during the 1920s. In 1937 she married artist Hilary Clark. Her novel, The Pea Pickers, shared the S. H. Prior Memorial Prize (run by the Bulletin) in 1940 with two other novels and was published in 1942. But in that year her marriage failed and she was committed to the Auckland Mental Hospital where she remained for seven years. Her children were subsequently placed in orphanages. On her release she worked on another novel, White Topee, which appeared in 1954. That year she also changed her name by deed poll to Oscar Wilde, a figure who played a significant role in her second novel. The manuscript of her third novel 'Wild Australia' was rejected by Angus and Robertson in 1953. Between 1956 and 1960 Langley travelled to Australia and Greece before settling permanently at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. She wrote prolifically during these years, but her work remained unpublished until 1999 when Lucy Frost published an edition of Langley's autobiographical writings entitled Wilde Eve. Eve Langley died alone in her cottage "Iona Lympus" in 1974.