A Fringe of Leaves. London: Cape, 1976.
———. The Aunt’s Story. London: Penguin Australia, 1948.
———. The Vivisector. Version 1.0. Penguin Classics. North Sydney NSW: Penguin Random House Australia, 1970.
The central character of this novel, Hurtle Duffield, engages with a schoolgirl muse. This lends White’s anecdote about having lunch at a Sydney art dealer’s Watson’s Bay home that much more intriguing: Rudi Kamon, the dealer, showed White one of Charles Blackman’s schoolgirl paintings in which the subject bore a resemblance to Thea Astley.
Voss : A Novel. [London]: Eyre & Spottiswoode and The Book Society, 1957.
978-1-922182-41-8
Happy Valley
The Text Publishing Company
©1939; Text Edition 2014
Patrick White’s first novel is set in the same region of Australia – the high country where the Eucumbene and Murrumbidgee Rivers rise – as Miles Franklin’s but the two are poles apart: My Brilliant Career makes its bed where true blue Aussies like Henry Lawson lie; Happy Valley casts its net more broadly, exploring the human condition in the Christina Stead vein. To begin with, the author focuses on a day’s events – much as James Joyce does in Ulysses – but then pans out to reveal that the men, women and children of Happy Valley are universal characters, that the lives of these people inhabiting a nondescript town located on Australia’s Great Dividing Range are no less buffeted by seasonal change and dramatic shifts in fortune than are Dubliners and Yoknapatawpha county, Mississippi, folk. Like Faulkner and Joyce, White sometimes seeks to write from inside the heads of the characters. It fails on that front but the narrative is as good as, perhaps better than, a David Malouf story.
