Amy Witting, 1918 - 2001, had written her beautiful little novel of Sydney about young Isobel when she, the author, was a mature woman by any standard . It was published in 1989 when she was 71 years of age. She had her very first story published in The New Yorker in 1965 when she was a 47 years of age and teaching at Cheltenham Girls High School, befriended and encouraged by fellow teacher and established writer, Thea Astley who had admired the story called 'Goodbye, Ady, Goodbye, Joe'.
Anyhow, when I for Isobel was published it was a recognised success and resulted in most of her earlier work of poetry and stories before then being re-published . Her works include the sequel Isobel on the way to the corner shop, several volumes of poetry including a collected poetical works of 1998, short story collections and two other novels.
I for Isobel is structured around five chapters which are each like perfectly crafted short stories bringing to life significant stages and awakenings in the life of Isobel. The whole novel comes together when read through as a rare insightful telling of childhood , family relationships and adolescent experiences with a positive, believable ending.
We first meet Isobel at age nine as she is pondering about and wishing to get a her birthday present (a first) from her parents in the eponymous chapter "The Birthday Present" where they are holidaying at a summer boarding house. Her mother is a jealous, sad woman in an unhappy marriage who uses her often unfair corrections of Isobel, a nine year old, to justify her own unhappy, straightened existence. Isobel's dawning awareness of this as a nine year old is resoundingly stated in this sentence towards the end of this chapter:
"There was not much to cry about, for her mother's intentions were far more violent than her blows. Her hands flapped weakly as if she were fighting against a cage of air"
This book astounds with pictorial and verbal economy in making small scenes such as this so etched, so developmental and real, you can hardly believe it. The story is told from Isobel's point of view but not in the first person. A factor which, I observe, gives a greater weight to the strong dialogue throughout the novel.
The second chapter "False idols and fireballs" tells a wonderful story about Isobel witnessing a fireball - which turned the "welling storm water rosy red" before her eyes. At the end of this chapter Isobel experiences an awareness of adult fear and subterfuge which is so different from her own - but is it?
In the evocatively entitled longer chapter 4, "Glassware and other breakable items", Isobel is starting out on her own in the world of work . She is now a school-leaver aged orphan, and being set up in a boarding house in Sydney and a typing job by a friendly-enough Aunt. The characters in the Boarding House and at the Glass Importers where she is working as a typist are very well sketched and add much colour and delight to the story. Isobel's working experiences as a translator of letters from German at the Glass Importers are often humorous - with dry, ironic observant humour being a feature of the writing in Isobel . It is in this chapter that we see Isobel find her feet a bit in the world of young adulthood. Several great scenes are set in a cafe with a group of Sydney University students who befriend her , and from whom she discovers a whole new world of poetry and literature.
The final chapter 5, entitled "I for Isobel" sees our main character come into her own via a couple of painful experiences including one obsessive , silly behaviour pattern she has set herself - in order, I suppose, to thumb her nose at society and the tough lessons life has given her. In the final sections of the story Isobel comes to a strong self realisation. I found the ending believable because my reading of Isobel's rite of passage, and her analysing of the world around and the experience she was gathering, was that she going to sort things out in her own way .
I cannot recommend this book more highly. Amy Witting brings an awesome intelligence to the telling of her tales in a prose which is spare, poetical and full of rich images. Various suburbs of Sydney feature in the story and it holds up as one of those novels which can be pointed to as 'being about Sydney'. I enjoyed that part of the book very much too - there are many good descriptions of street scenes, public transport and so on.
I for Isobel is a work to savour and bears re-reading several times. As a background note on her personality we know Amy Witting is a pseudonym and this choice, as was said in a biographical note by Yvonne Miels of Flinders University, reflects a long held promise to herself to 'never give up on consciousness' not to be unwitting but to always remain 'witting'. I also recommend for any one enjoying this book to have a quick look at some of the entries on various web sites about her.
For discussion , I would like to ask.
Did you find Isobel a convincing character?
Can you date the settings of the book? I am not sure - I thought the 50s but I havent come across a reference yet.
Do you have a favourite section or incident?
Faye Lawrence
The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson
A few months ago The Land of Spices by the Irish novelist Kate O'Brien was featured in this blog. This month our subject is an Australian novel which has some similarities to the Irish one. The Getting of Wisdom, published in 1910 by Henry Handel Richardson (1870-1946, real name Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson) is like the somewhat later Irish novel set in a private girls' school whose pupils largely come from privileged backgrounds. Both novels are set in a period not long before the First World War, and the main student character in both comes from a home where there are financial problems not experienced by many of the other students. (It might also be mentioned that Richardson was rather proud of her Irish descent!)
The differences are nevertheless considerable. The Irish novel has two central figures, whereas The Getting of Wisdom is very much the story of Laura, whose experiences in the novel are to a considerable extent based on Richardson's own as a pupil at Presbyterian Ladies' College Melbourne. For much of the novel Laura is the only school character who is developed to any extent , and throughout the novel, apart from a few cameos, the teachers are all minor figures, or caricatures, like the preposterously formidable 'dragon', Mrs Gurley. Both novels were unpopular with the schools that their authors had attended, but it is far easier to understand the unhappiness of PLC Melbourne. Teachers and pupils at the school almost all seem obsessively snobbish and mean-minded. Until the later chapters it would be difficult to name a sympathetic character.
Much of the book is the story of the bruising encounters between Laura's unsophisticated impulsive, high spirits, and desire to fit in, and her companions' relentless determination to exclude or ostracise here, often on the basis of evidence that her family in not well-to-do that she inadvertently provides. It is comic, because Laura's is often her own worst enemy, but it also fills the reader with a contempt for those around her who are so eager to take offence. In the later chapters of the book, following a summer in the company of her sister when she comes to feel that little though she may fit in at school, she has grown apart from her family at home, Laura does make some friends and win a measure of acceptance. She gains the friendship of the priggish 'M.P.' and her offsider 'Cupid' by cleverly exploiting M.P.'s wish to be a moral arbiter, and later becomes the chosen companion of the school's most beautiful and most privileged student, an older girl called Evelyn. Richardson makes very clear that Laura's infatuation with the older girl has a strong element of the sexual in it, but the reader may perhaps wonder at Evelyn's choosing Laura as her companion.
The title of the book is clearly ironic. The wisdom Laura learns is that of outwardly conforming, and saying what her companions expect of her. One of Richardson's achievements is that despite the autobigraphical element Laura never becomes a heroine whose inner strength and genuine moral superiority set her apart. It is quite clear that Laura objects to snobbery and bullying because she is the victim, not because she dislikes snobbery and bullying per se. The final scene, when Laura, having just walked out the school gates for the last time as a pupil, runs joyfully through a park, is somewhat ambivalent. We must wonder how free she really is.
H.G. Wells is said to have described this book as the best school story he knew. It has been in print almost continuously since 1910, and a new edition, with an introduction by Germaine Greer, is about to appear. It is a splendidly narrated book, vivid, entertaining, and convincing, and impressive in the honesty of its presentation of the flawed but ultimately rather attractive central figure.
The differences are nevertheless considerable. The Irish novel has two central figures, whereas The Getting of Wisdom is very much the story of Laura, whose experiences in the novel are to a considerable extent based on Richardson's own as a pupil at Presbyterian Ladies' College Melbourne. For much of the novel Laura is the only school character who is developed to any extent , and throughout the novel, apart from a few cameos, the teachers are all minor figures, or caricatures, like the preposterously formidable 'dragon', Mrs Gurley. Both novels were unpopular with the schools that their authors had attended, but it is far easier to understand the unhappiness of PLC Melbourne. Teachers and pupils at the school almost all seem obsessively snobbish and mean-minded. Until the later chapters it would be difficult to name a sympathetic character.
Much of the book is the story of the bruising encounters between Laura's unsophisticated impulsive, high spirits, and desire to fit in, and her companions' relentless determination to exclude or ostracise here, often on the basis of evidence that her family in not well-to-do that she inadvertently provides. It is comic, because Laura's is often her own worst enemy, but it also fills the reader with a contempt for those around her who are so eager to take offence. In the later chapters of the book, following a summer in the company of her sister when she comes to feel that little though she may fit in at school, she has grown apart from her family at home, Laura does make some friends and win a measure of acceptance. She gains the friendship of the priggish 'M.P.' and her offsider 'Cupid' by cleverly exploiting M.P.'s wish to be a moral arbiter, and later becomes the chosen companion of the school's most beautiful and most privileged student, an older girl called Evelyn. Richardson makes very clear that Laura's infatuation with the older girl has a strong element of the sexual in it, but the reader may perhaps wonder at Evelyn's choosing Laura as her companion.
The title of the book is clearly ironic. The wisdom Laura learns is that of outwardly conforming, and saying what her companions expect of her. One of Richardson's achievements is that despite the autobigraphical element Laura never becomes a heroine whose inner strength and genuine moral superiority set her apart. It is quite clear that Laura objects to snobbery and bullying because she is the victim, not because she dislikes snobbery and bullying per se. The final scene, when Laura, having just walked out the school gates for the last time as a pupil, runs joyfully through a park, is somewhat ambivalent. We must wonder how free she really is.
H.G. Wells is said to have described this book as the best school story he knew. It has been in print almost continuously since 1910, and a new edition, with an introduction by Germaine Greer, is about to appear. It is a splendidly narrated book, vivid, entertaining, and convincing, and impressive in the honesty of its presentation of the flawed but ultimately rather attractive central figure.
A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry
This novel is the story of a young man who at the age of eighteen volunteers to serve in the First World War. It follows him from before enlistement through most of the war to his death in its final weeks. He fights on the Western Front, and experiences the wellknown horrors of trench warfare in that theatre.
A rather similar description could of course be applied to many novels. The classic example of the genre is probably still Im Westen nichts Neues by Erich Maria Remarque, first published in 1928 and translated into English the following year as All Quiet on the Western Front. The question might be asked why we need yet another book on the subject, though arguably the horrors of the mass slaughter of young men who at the start of the war had no idea what they would encounter have a powerful resonance that permits repeated treatments of the subject.
A Long Long Way has distinctive features, however. Willie Dunne is Irish, a Dublin construction worker, the son of a senior police officer who is firmly loyal to the British Crown in an Ireland then still part of the United Kingdom. Willie seems to enlist without much thought, in part from a desire to prove himself to his father, who has been disappointed by his dimunitive son's failure to reach the minimum height required to join the police. Willie's enlistment does not favourably impress his girlfriend, Gretta, who feels that it demonstrates a certain lack of knowing his own mind in a man who wants to marry her, and Gretta's ultimate decision to marry another man who has not gone to war forms part of Willie's private tragedy.
The fact that Willie is Irish and Catholic, part of what is initially an Irish regiment, is central to the novel, because it leads him to uncertainties and troubles of mind not experienced by soldiers from different backgrounds. Willie finds himself, perhaps a little too coincidentally, marching through Dublin on the day the Easter Rising of 1916 breaks out, and he is soon a bit confused as to where his loyalties lie, something he tentatively indicates in a letter to his father, who responds with fury. One of the successes of the novel is its treatment of this inner conflict: Willie never resolves it, and this is presented in a way that seems entirely convincing.
Willie is in some ways an 'everyman' (or at least every Irish World War I soldier) figure, but he comes vividly to life. He is of ordinary intelligence, likeable, brave enough but no hero, often confused, often frightened, but capable of snatching what happiness he can from his circumstances. His letters home are poignant and seem utterly convincing for someone who is, of course, little more than a boy.
The book has won considerable praise, though some military historians have pointed to errors of fact, particularly in regard to the command structure of the British Army. The suggestion that towards the end of the novel Irishmen were rarely encountered in the ranks seems exaggerated: 200,000 of them served, of whom 30,000 were killed. It is true, however, that for a variety of reasons, not all alluded to in the novel, recruitment from Ireland became sparse in the last years of the war. (Of course it must be remembered that Barry is writing a novel, not history, though the creator of an historical novel does probably have to observe some of the historian's obligations.)
There is much that is powerful and moving in this novel. Not least moving is the way towards the end Willie, having lost Gretta and having being more or less disowned by his father, feels real happiness at getting back to the front and rejoining the few of his longterm fellow soldiers who are still alive. The book is the work of an author well known as a poet as well as a novelist, and the style throughout is poetic. For this reader, at least, the poetic element in the style quite frequently seemed a bit overwrought. An example taken at random is from the opening paragrapy of chapter 20: 'Like an old ash tree he feared he would slowly hollow out, the rot taking him inwardly ring by blackened ring, until the winter wind came and blew him down'.
I was moved, and impressed, by this novel, though more on the first reading than the second. I did find that the style tended to irritate slightly the second time round. But I am glad to have read it.
A rather similar description could of course be applied to many novels. The classic example of the genre is probably still Im Westen nichts Neues by Erich Maria Remarque, first published in 1928 and translated into English the following year as All Quiet on the Western Front. The question might be asked why we need yet another book on the subject, though arguably the horrors of the mass slaughter of young men who at the start of the war had no idea what they would encounter have a powerful resonance that permits repeated treatments of the subject.
A Long Long Way has distinctive features, however. Willie Dunne is Irish, a Dublin construction worker, the son of a senior police officer who is firmly loyal to the British Crown in an Ireland then still part of the United Kingdom. Willie seems to enlist without much thought, in part from a desire to prove himself to his father, who has been disappointed by his dimunitive son's failure to reach the minimum height required to join the police. Willie's enlistment does not favourably impress his girlfriend, Gretta, who feels that it demonstrates a certain lack of knowing his own mind in a man who wants to marry her, and Gretta's ultimate decision to marry another man who has not gone to war forms part of Willie's private tragedy.
The fact that Willie is Irish and Catholic, part of what is initially an Irish regiment, is central to the novel, because it leads him to uncertainties and troubles of mind not experienced by soldiers from different backgrounds. Willie finds himself, perhaps a little too coincidentally, marching through Dublin on the day the Easter Rising of 1916 breaks out, and he is soon a bit confused as to where his loyalties lie, something he tentatively indicates in a letter to his father, who responds with fury. One of the successes of the novel is its treatment of this inner conflict: Willie never resolves it, and this is presented in a way that seems entirely convincing.
Willie is in some ways an 'everyman' (or at least every Irish World War I soldier) figure, but he comes vividly to life. He is of ordinary intelligence, likeable, brave enough but no hero, often confused, often frightened, but capable of snatching what happiness he can from his circumstances. His letters home are poignant and seem utterly convincing for someone who is, of course, little more than a boy.
The book has won considerable praise, though some military historians have pointed to errors of fact, particularly in regard to the command structure of the British Army. The suggestion that towards the end of the novel Irishmen were rarely encountered in the ranks seems exaggerated: 200,000 of them served, of whom 30,000 were killed. It is true, however, that for a variety of reasons, not all alluded to in the novel, recruitment from Ireland became sparse in the last years of the war. (Of course it must be remembered that Barry is writing a novel, not history, though the creator of an historical novel does probably have to observe some of the historian's obligations.)
There is much that is powerful and moving in this novel. Not least moving is the way towards the end Willie, having lost Gretta and having being more or less disowned by his father, feels real happiness at getting back to the front and rejoining the few of his longterm fellow soldiers who are still alive. The book is the work of an author well known as a poet as well as a novelist, and the style throughout is poetic. For this reader, at least, the poetic element in the style quite frequently seemed a bit overwrought. An example taken at random is from the opening paragrapy of chapter 20: 'Like an old ash tree he feared he would slowly hollow out, the rot taking him inwardly ring by blackened ring, until the winter wind came and blew him down'.
I was moved, and impressed, by this novel, though more on the first reading than the second. I did find that the style tended to irritate slightly the second time round. But I am glad to have read it.
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