AustLit

'Helen Vines’s Eve Langley and the Pea Pickers attempts more than its title suggests: it is both literary biography, and a literary critical exercise, aiming to separate the life from the fiction but inevitably seeing the interrelationships. However, because Langley writes fictionalised autobiography (no-one disputes this), Helen Vines sifts the known facts judiciously in chapters 1–5, but in chapter 6, she writes (explicitly) speculatively, drawing on a small repertoire of five clinical texts and articles and the opinion of an unnamed clinical psychologist, for some of her insights. This small body of texts and articles dates from the 1980s.' 

(Introduction)