AustLit

'World War II, and the Cold War which followed it, were years of stresses and strain for Eleanor Dark. When Lantana Lane appeared in 1959, signalling, as it turned out, the end of her literary career and seemingly light years away from her previous work, it was the culmination of two intense decades. At the beginning of 1940 she was still engaged in the long, laborious research for The Timeless Land trilogy, making daily trips to the Mitchell Library, even in the dead of winter. She was sharing the civilian experience of food shortages, wartime restrictions and rationing. Despite the popular and critical success of The Timeless Land (1941), top of The London Times' Christmas fiction list and the Book of the Month in the U.S. in October, repeatedly in letters to her publishers Dark declared herself "bothered" by her immersion in the past.' (Author's abstract)