Patrick White : A Life.

© 1991

Milsons Point, N.S.W: Random House.

 

Booktopia Review

Top Shelf Tome.

If Australia’s first Nobel Laureate for Literature was to have a biographer it had better be someone of the calibre of David Marr. Situating us in time and place, this superb book greatly enhances the experience of reading a White novel.

PWAL/400
PW’s 1962 short story, ‘The Letters’ had a “rich queen called George Blackwood” as its inspiration for the man and that man’s phobia came from William Dobell’s “strange fear of opening his mail”. “The mother of the story has a dash of Ruth in her, but she is really a portrait of Geoffrey Dutton’s mother, the fabulous and ancient beauty of Anlaby who died at this time. Sybil Thorndike is said to have remarked, waving from her car as she left a lunch with Mrs Dutton at Anlaby, ‘I wish I could play that role.’ ”
George Bernard Shaw wrote ‘Saint Joan’ especially for Sybil Thorndike according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_Thorndike