Day 5: Madeleine: A Life of Madeleine St John
On the fifth day of Christmas, my literary love bought for me…
Helen Trinca’s Madeleine: A Life of Madeleine St John!
Helen Trinca’s Madeleine: A Life of Madeleine St John is the first, and the definitive, biography of one of Australia’s most significant writers. It was awarded the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-fiction.
Is this your perfect Christmas gift?
The 2014 Stella Prize judges said of Madeleine:
Madeleine St John wrote four novels, the first of which was not published until she was 51; in 1997 she became the first Australian woman to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A contemporary of Germaine Greer, Clive James and other celebrated Australian expatriates, she rejected the tag ‘Australian’, although born and raised in Sydney. After moving to England in 1968 during the breakup of her marriage, she lived a reclusive life in London and died of emphysema in 2006, when she was only 64.
Her mother’s suicide, her lifelong conflict with her father, and her own exceptional talent combined to make her personality both difficult and intriguing, and Helen Trinca counters its dramatic and often melodramatic qualities with a quietly realistic and carefully researched biography that manages to balance empathy and truthfulness about St John’s life. The book draws out her inner life and thought processes from her letters and interviews, and places that in the context of her public life as a writer. St John’s rejection of an Australian identity has meant that she fell through the cracks of Australian literary history until Text reprinted her first novel, The Women in Black, in 2012. Helen Trinca’s book ranges beyond the particular life of St John to consider the wider topics of family dysfunction, the writer’s craft, and the cultural and social history of Australia. Traditional and straightforward in its approach to biography as such, its choice of subject makes it original and intriguing.
Links and Media
- Read Helen’s thoughts on the process of writing Madeleine in the Australian.
- Listen to Helen discuss Madeleine with Margaret Throsby on ABC Radio National.
- Read Lucy Sussex’s review for the Sydney Review of Books.
- Read Catherine Ford’s review for The Monthly.
- Read an interview with Helen on the Wheeler Centre’s website.
Helen’s recommendations: The best books by women she read in 2014
In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower (Text Publishing)
‘I am an unabashed fan of her books and while this is not Harrower’s best, it’s a brilliant dissection of intersecting lives and the hazards of being human.’
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters (Little, Brown)
‘This would never have been on my radar without my bookclub, as it’s not the style of novel I would normally seek out. But it’s a terrific read at so many levels – plot, psychological exploration, cultural and social imperatives – that I couldn’t close my Kindle.’
Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil by Hannah Arendt (Penguin)
‘This of course was first published in 1963, and it’s one of those books that one knows one should have read decades ago, so important has it been to the shaping of our views about the nature of political evil and its perpetrators. Reading it this year, for the first time, was one of the most thrilling intellectual outings I’ve had. A book to reread and ponder.’
Purchase Madeleine: A Life of Madeleine St John through Text Publishing.
View the other books in Stella’s 12 Days of Christmas.
