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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
Located in the Blue Mountains in the late 1930s, this compelling story has as its centre a wealthy upper middle class family, the St. James. The focus is on Eve, the mother, and the two daughters, Stevie and Bea, and a young man who becomes a frequent visitor to the St. James' household; taken in by Eve after the death of his guardian, Angus Weekes cannot resist becoming involved in the ultimately tragic patterns of their lives. The story is told from the viewpoints of Angus (part one), Bea (part two) and Eve (part three).
Adaptations
-
form
y
Edens Lost
ABC Television
(publisher),
( dir. Neil Armfield
)
Australia
Birmingham
:
Central Independent Television
ABC Television
,
1988
Z1167993
1988
series - publisher
film/TV
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.
Notes
-
Dedication: For Marie
-
Epigraph: Where the apple reddens / Never pry - / Lest we lose our Edens, / Eve and I. / Browning, 'A Woman's Last Word'
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Also sound recording, large print.
Works about this Work
-
‘The Writers’ Picnic’ : Genealogy and Homographesis in the Fiction of Sumner Locke Elliott
2018
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 17 no. 2 2018;'Like many mid-century authors, Sumner Locke-Elliott fled Australia for more welcoming shores. From his first novel Careful He Might Hear You (1963), Locke-Elliott laid the foundations for a fictional self-authorship that suffused his writing with biographic detail and themes of origin, place and time. Despite his long absence from Australia and his naturalisation as an American citizen, his final novel and fictional coming out in Fairyland (1990) returns readers to the homophobic Sydney of his childhood. This blurring of biographic and fictional detail within the representational space of childhood creates an embodied literary network that connects Australia of the 1930s & 1940s and New York of the 1980s & 1990s, merging literary corpus and authorial life. Taking up this sense of presence, absence and connection, I argue that Locke-Elliot’s representation of childhood is a nostalgic point of interface that generatively refigures his oeuvre as an embodied queer and transnational literary network.' (Publication abstract)
-
'But Even Memory Is Fiction' : The (Fictional) Life and (Self ) Writing of Sumner Locke Elliott
2016
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 75 no. 2 2016; (p. 172-192) 'Shaun Bell recuperates Lock-Elliott from his common status as footnote or aside in accounts of literary networks, to identify common figures and set pirces across his oeuvre, as a ways of reading of his 'construction of self through nostalgia, art and life.' (Editorial, 7) -
Writer Crushed by the Sexual Constraints of the Pre-War World
2013
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 6-7 April 2013; (p. 18-19)
— Review of Edens Lost 1969 single work novel -
Careful, He's Made Himself Heard at Last
1990
single work
criticism
biography
— Appears in: The Australian Magazine , 16-17 June 1990; (p. 4) -
The Man Who Won't Come Back
Michele Field
(interviewer),
1989
single work
interview
— Appears in: The Bulletin , 28 February 1989; (p. 102-103)
-
Writer Crushed by the Sexual Constraints of the Pre-War World
2013
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 6-7 April 2013; (p. 18-19)
— Review of Edens Lost 1969 single work novel -
Careful, He's Made Himself Heard at Last
1990
single work
criticism
biography
— Appears in: The Australian Magazine , 16-17 June 1990; (p. 4) -
The Man Who Won't Come Back
Michele Field
(interviewer),
1989
single work
interview
— Appears in: The Bulletin , 28 February 1989; (p. 102-103) -
Gow Bows Out as the Messiah
1988
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 12 March 1988; (p. 67) -
'But Even Memory Is Fiction' : The (Fictional) Life and (Self ) Writing of Sumner Locke Elliott
2016
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 75 no. 2 2016; (p. 172-192) 'Shaun Bell recuperates Lock-Elliott from his common status as footnote or aside in accounts of literary networks, to identify common figures and set pirces across his oeuvre, as a ways of reading of his 'construction of self through nostalgia, art and life.' (Editorial, 7) -
‘The Writers’ Picnic’ : Genealogy and Homographesis in the Fiction of Sumner Locke Elliott
2018
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 17 no. 2 2018;'Like many mid-century authors, Sumner Locke-Elliott fled Australia for more welcoming shores. From his first novel Careful He Might Hear You (1963), Locke-Elliott laid the foundations for a fictional self-authorship that suffused his writing with biographic detail and themes of origin, place and time. Despite his long absence from Australia and his naturalisation as an American citizen, his final novel and fictional coming out in Fairyland (1990) returns readers to the homophobic Sydney of his childhood. This blurring of biographic and fictional detail within the representational space of childhood creates an embodied literary network that connects Australia of the 1930s & 1940s and New York of the 1980s & 1990s, merging literary corpus and authorial life. Taking up this sense of presence, absence and connection, I argue that Locke-Elliot’s representation of childhood is a nostalgic point of interface that generatively refigures his oeuvre as an embodied queer and transnational literary network.' (Publication abstract)
