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y separately published work icon The Aunt's Story single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 1948... 1948 The Aunt's Story
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'With the death of her mother, middle-aged Theodora Goodman contemplates the desert of her life. Freed from the trammels of convention, she leaves Australia for a European tour and becomes involved with the residents of a small French hotel. But creating other people's lives, even in love and pity, can lead to madness. Her ability to reconcile joy and sorrow is an unbearable torture to her. On the journey home, Theodora finds there is little to choose between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality. She looks for peace, even if it is beyond the borders of insanity.' (From the publisher's website.)

Exhibitions

18005741
18005672

Notes

  • Dedication: For Betty Withycombe
  • Epigraphs from Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm begin Parts One and Three. An epigraph from Henry Miller's Black Spring begins Part Two.
  • Hubber and Smith note a 1976 Japanese translation which was published in one volume with the work of Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Routledge ,
      1948 .
      Extent: 346p.
      Note/s:
      • First published in September 1948.
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Viking ,
      1948 .
      image of person or book cover 1287524376698261379.jpg
      This image has been sourced from Goodreads.
      Extent: 281p.
      Reprinted: 1948 , 1962 Compass Books edition. , 1974
      Note/s:
      • First published in January 1948.
    • Toronto, Ontario,
      c
      Canada,
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Macmillan ,
      1948 .
      image of person or book cover 6688924132436187738.jpg
      This image has been sourced from Wikipedia.
      Extent: 281p.
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Eyre and Spottiswoode ,
      1958 .
      image of person or book cover 9135519321014654456.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 303p.
      Reprinted: 1958 , 1969
    • Harmondsworth, Middlesex,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Penguin ,
      1963 .
      image of person or book cover 5451513245073581388.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 287p.
      Reprinted: 1969 , 1971 , 1974 , 1976 , 1977 , 1982 , 1987 , 1985 , 1988 , 1993
    • Harmondsworth, Middlesex,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Mitcham, Blackburn - Mitcham - Vermont area, Melbourne - East, Melbourne, Victoria,: Penguin ,
      1963 .
      image of person or book cover 6143458729806057672.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 299p.
      Reprinted: 1969 , 1971 , 1974 , 1981
      Note/s:
      • Australian issue.
      Series: Penguin Books Penguin Books (publisher), series - publisher Number in series: AU5
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Avon Books ,
      1975 .
      image of person or book cover 8669138560852304569.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 290p.
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Vintage UK ,
      1994 .
      image of person or book cover 3464573326109769057.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 286p.
      ISBN: 0099324016
    • North Sydney, North Sydney - Lane Cove area, Sydney Northern Suburbs, Sydney, New South Wales,: Vintage Australia , 2008 .
      image of person or book cover 3296422278979002242.jpg
      Cover image courtesy of publisher.
      Extent: 336p.
      ISBN: 9781741667585
      Series: y separately published work icon Australian Vintage Classics North Sydney : Vintage Australia , 2008- Z1484482 2008 series - publisher
    • Melbourne, Victoria,: Penguin , 2018 .
      image of person or book cover 5527771689318189100.jpg
      Cover image courtesy of publisher.
      Extent: 352p.
      Note/s:
      • Published March 19, 2018

      ISBN: 9780143791027
Alternative title: Mai un passo amico
Language: Italian
    • Rome,
      c
      Italy,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Casini ,
      1951 .
      image of person or book cover 7414974179351635437.jpg
      This image has been sourced from Goodreads.
      Extent: 321p.

Other Formats

  • Also braille and sound recording.

Works about this Work

Sexuality in Patrick White’s Fiction Hong Chen , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel 2023; (p. 135-147)

'This chapter will build on recent work by Elizabeth McMahon and Christos Tsiolkas to situate Australia’s first Nobel Prize winner as a queer modernist with his own distinct political valence. Written by the foremost Chinese scholar of Australian literature, Chen Hong, this chapter explores Whites epochal career. It covers White’s novelistic oeuvre from The Aunt’s Story (1948) through to his late queer masterpiece, The Twyborn Affair (1979).' (Publication abstract)

Flaunting Dissonance : The Queering of Narrative and Gender Boundaries in Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story Greg Graham-Smith , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature , June vol. 58 no. 2 2023; (p. 391–408)

'The Twyborn Affair (1979) is generally regarded as Patrick White’s covert “coming out” novel, followed by his frank “confession” in his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981). However, this article explores how even an earlier work such as The Aunt’s Story (1977/1948), from the Nobel laureate’s modernist phase, may be seen as a pre-text for the gay self, whereby the author stages incomplete representations of his own subaltern position in the characters he “becomes” in his writing. Through a series of textual feints, his persona is disseminated in the form of polyvalent alternative selves which belie any possibility for recuperation of a stable, authentic selfhood. White thereby refuses the univocal inscription of subjectivity upon which sexual hegemony is predicated. What I aim to do in this article is to extend the particularities of the novel’s writing strategies (found in the Jardin Exotique section, for example, which functions as a Foucauldian heterotopic space) into the province of gender. In doing so, I will show how the gay author, through the central character, Theodora Goodman’s protean identities and the deployment of competing narrative epistemologies, can fabricate alternative subject positions. These attest not only to the artificial technologies of gender constitution, but also function as remnants of White’s own divided status, brought about by his dissonant subaltern position in the borderlands of representation.' (Publication abstract)

Australian Literature and the Arab-Australian Migrant Novel Jumana Bayeh , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 79 no. 1 2019; (p. 129-148)
'Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story, published in 1948 and set in the 1930s, is one of the few Australian novels that features an Arab male character. His inclusion gives readers an insight into how an Arab was represented and, by extension, perceived in early- to mid-twentieth century Australia. The Arab in this case is a travelling salesman or a hawker, an occupation adopted by many early male and female migrants from what was then a region in Syria, today known as Lebanon. Hawkers traversed vast tracts of remote Australia peddling an array of wares, and their arrival to a country town or estate like Meroë in The Aunt’s Story, was met with excitement.' (Introduction)
y separately published work icon Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction : An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh Bridget Grogan , Leiden : Brill , 2019 15911959 2019 multi chapter work criticism

'In Reading Corporeality in Patrick White's Fiction: An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh, Bridget Grogan combines theoretical explication, textual comparison, and close reading to argue that corporeality is central to Patrick White's fiction, shaping the characterization, style, narrative trajectories, and implicit philosophy of his novels and short stories. Critics have often identified a radical disgust at play in White's writing, claiming that it arises from a defining dualism that posits the 'purity' of the disembodied 'spirit' in relation to the 'pollution' of the material world. Grogan argues convincingly, however, that White's fiction is far more complex in its approach to the body. Modeling ways in which Kristevan theory may be applied to modern fiction, her close attention to White's recurring interest in physicality and abjection draws attention to his complex questioning of metaphysics and subjectivity, thereby providing a fresh and compelling reading of this important world author.'

Magda Meets Theodora : Language and Interiority in The Aunt’s Story and In The Heart of the Country Bill Ashcroft , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , February vol. 33 no. 1 2018;

'In ‘Orders of Discourse’ Foucault raises the deeply embedded opposition between reason and folly: ‘From the depths of the Middle Ages a man was mad if his speech could not be said to form part of the common discourse of men’. This discursive rule becomes magnified in the case of women and of the colonised. In Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country and Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story, Magda and Theodora demonstrate the precarious marginality of the colonial woman. They are doubly marginalised as colonial women, existing outside settler history, which is the narrative both of the masculine responsibilities of settlement and an attendant sense of displacement. In Coetzee’s novel, Magda plays out a version of The Tempest in which she is subjected both to the Law of the Father and to Caliban, while in The Aunt’s Story Theodora plots a determined path out of the discourse of men into the ambivalently liberating horizon of madness. The differences between the women say as much as the similarities, but both offer a compelling version of the layered marginalities of the female colonial subject. In the writers’ hands the place outside discourse, the peculiar language of the colonial women, becomes the potential location of counter discourse. This essay proposes that the women demonstrate a radical interiority, a capacity to inhabit the lives of others in a way that is considered madness but which enacts the utopian function of literature itself.' (Publication abstract)

Old Gold Rhianna Boyle , 2003 single work review
— Appears in: Syntax , no. 6 2003; (p. 23-24)

— Review of The Aunt's Story Patrick White , 1948 single work novel
[Review] The Mirage [et al] Sidney J. Baker , 1959 single work review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 21 February 1959; (p. 19)

— Review of The Mirage F. B. Vickers , 1955 single work novel ; The Aunt's Story Patrick White , 1948 single work novel ; You Can't See Round Corners Jon Cleary , 1947 single work novel
Sublime Madness? Peter Coleman , 1959 single work review
— Appears in: The Observer , 7 February vol. 2 no. 3 1959; (p. 87)

— Review of To the Islands Randolph Stow , 1958 single work novel ; The Aunt's Story Patrick White , 1948 single work novel
[Review] The Aunt's Story John Woodburn , 1948 single work review
— Appears in: New Republic , 16 February vol. 118 no. 7 1948; (p. 27-28)

— Review of The Aunt's Story Patrick White , 1948 single work novel
The Imago R. G. Howarth , 1950 single work review
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 11 no. 4 1950; (p. 209-210)

— Review of The Aunt's Story Patrick White , 1948 single work novel
Imagery and Structure in Patrick White's Novels Karin Hansson , 1991 single work criticism
— Appears in: Breaking Circles 1991; (p. 175-181)
Patrick White and the Aesthetics of Death Noel Macainsh , 1987 single work criticism
— Appears in: LiNQ , vol. 15 no. 2 1987; (p. 2-14) The Pathos of Distance 1992; (p. 290-303)
Mandala Symbolism in the Novels of Patrick White Shaik Samad , 1995-1996 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Commonwealth Review , vol. 7 no. 1 1995-1996; (p. 117-123)
Patrick White: An International Perspective John Colmer , 1991 single work criticism
— Appears in: Breaking Circles 1991; (p. 182-196)
Patrick White and Theodora Goodman in New Mexico John Beston , 2004 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , December vol. 18 no. 2 2004; (p. 171-173)
Last amended 23 Jul 2021 13:07:48
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