The Vera Wright Trilogy: My Father's Moon / Cabin Fever / The Georges' Wife

by Elizabeth Jolley

This moving masterpiece by one of Australia’s leading novelists—now in its entirety—inaugurates Persea’s series of Elizabeth Jolley revivals.

Set in 1940s wartime England, the trilogy follows young Vera, who leaves her cultivated Midlands home to become a nurse in a military hospital and is catapulted into adulthood through unorthodox love entanglements with both men and women, two illegitimate children, and finally emigration to Australia, where, from her new vantage point—now a doctor and writer—she looks back on her life’s journey. Combining the beauty of Virginia Woolf with the spare, heartbreaking insightfulness of Jean Rhys, the trilogy is both a literary tour de force and an accessible, universal portrait of a woman in search of sustaining love.The concluding volume, The Georges’ Wife, is published here for the first time in the US. The first two volumes have long been out of print. North American readers can now experience “the most ambitious and accomplished work in Jolley’s oeuvre” (J. M. Coetzee).

Genres: Fiction

569 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 23, 2010

About the author

Monica Elizabeth Jolley was an award-winning writer who settled in Western Australia in the late 1950s. She was 53 years old when her first book was published, and she went on to publish fifteen novels (including an autobiographical trilogy), four short story collections, and three non-fiction books, publishing well into her 70s and achieving significant critical acclaim. She was also a pioneer of creative writing teaching in Australia, counting many well known writers such as Tim Winton among her students. Her novels explore alienated characters and the nature of loneliness and entrapment.

Honours:
1987: Western Australian Citizen of the Year
1988: Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for services to literature
1989: Canada/Australia Literary Award
1997: Australian Living Treasure

Reviews

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy this more in hindsight than I did while reading it, but if nothing else I'm convinced that I should read Jolley's work over the next few years. I'm also convinced that this is best read as a trilogy--one volume a year--rather than as a continuous novel. So you're warned.

For almost the whole thing is written in the first person present tense, the least bearable of styles. It's a tribute to Jolley's many virtues that I even finished it.

There's a good reason to write it this way, of course: part of the point of the book is to destabilize our usual distinction between experience and memory. The narrator seems to be at a medical conference in New York, in a hotel, looking back on her fascinating life: German parents in mid-century England; rebellion and uncertainty; poverty; bohemianism; illegitimate children; a long sexual, sentimental, and artistic education. All of these moments cross, but never really converge at any one point.

So the form fits the tale, the tale is interesting, the books elicit emotions as well as ideas, and yet the whole thing just wasn't that much fun the first time through. I expect I'll re-read it and, knowing now the point and the book's direction, enjoy it very much. For now, I'll read some of her other books.

[Heath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shocked these haven’t already been snagged up for a NYRB Classics reissue. They’re brilliant. Is truly crazy Elizabeth Jolley’s name isn’t better known. Each of her books I’ve read have been startlingly good, rich, strange, satisfying.

[Nina Sankovitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is not often that I discover a writer who creates a character who I wish could be a real life friend. Elizabeth Jolley's unforgettable character, Vera Wright, moves through the three novels of her life, My Father's Moon, Cabin Fever, and The Georges' Wife as an irritating, intriguing, and finally utterly beguiling woman. She both defines and defies long-held notions of what it means to be female. The three novels have been released as The Vera Wright Trilogy by Persea Books, and the publication is a must read. Jolley, who published her first works in her fifties, and died in 2007 at the age of eighty-four, was a writer as honest and intelligent as Virginia Woolf. She was as witty, sharp, and engaging as Edith Templeton, and as aware of the traps and promise of being female as Kate Chopin.

In telling the story of Vera Wright, an arresting, complex, and perplexing character, Jolley uses a circular rotation of memories, actions, and observations to create a forward-moving narrative that also looks backward. Much as in real life we move forward, forced to go on by the inexorable passing of days, while still engaged in what has gone before; we never move without the constraints of our past actions, and neither does Vera. Vera's life mirrors that of Jolley herself, raised to go far through education, yet leaving school to become a nurse during World War II. She strikes up friendships and lovers in unexpected places and leaves England for a new life in Australia. Vera must also struggle with unwanted pregnancies, miserable jobs, desperate times, and parents that while loved, cannot not be tolerated for long (Jolley's acuity in portraying the cruelty of children and the ineptness of parental love is profound).

Vera both consciously and unconsciously conjures up scenes from her life again and again. To name a few: the flowers collected in the field by her school; her mother's lamentation that a book about Elizabeth Ney led to Vera's out of wedlock child; the vision of her lover's neck, exposed and vulnerable; a field of deepest green sloping up to meet a house; her habit of peering closely into hedges to avoid confrontation or unpleasantness. The repeated memories evoke Vera's past in the moments when she is struggling most hardily with her present, providing balm to her pain at times, and pouring salt on wounds, at times, better left to heal.

Slowly the memories worked their magic on me as well; they become my memories - I recognized the tone, flavor, and mood set by the words - and Vera became part of me. I understood her as a contradictory and very real person. She is a woman unsure of her identity, coursing with ambition and feverish with need, capable of both calculation and complete naivete. She is a woman vulnerable and wounding, pliable and yet selfish, needy and yet trying for independence, strong at her best, but weak when tired, worn out, or just cold and hungry. Vera Wright is a woman caught up in the changes of the twentieth century, held by a past defined by her parents and determined to make her own future.

The writing of Jolley is so beautiful that at times I stopped to just reread a sentence: "The grass has been trodden down heavily...[t]his seems to enhance its fragrance...as if being crushed it is now all the sweeter, as if adversity can bring about something pleasant." Her words ring with truth: "It is only a such small thing I have to tell. Perhaps it is the small things which are the hardest to tell. They are the things that make all the difference."

Jolley can be surreal and disorienting, as in a scene where dolls become prostitutes and flower sellers: "I place Patsy on the street corner....she persuades me to cut the neck of her dress really low. It looks daring and her pink chest shows." Jolley can be very, very funny, but always within shades of darkness: "Lois spreads the buns with her nursing scissors and, when we have finished eating, she remembers she did a taxi driver's feet with them this afternoon."

The brilliance of Jolley rests not only in her characterization and her language, but also in her understanding of how memories both support and haunt us, and in her ability to relate that understanding to her readers: "Whether things are written down or not they dwell somewhere within and surface unbidden at any time"; "remembered people appear and disappear disconcertingly in the tiniest nutshells of memory"; and "[i]t seems strange now to remember small things from years ago. Perhaps remembering them means they are not so small." Tied in with memory there is always loss, moments and people who cannot be replaced: "understanding the loneliness and despair of knowing it is not possible to bring back a wished for person, and knowing that one person can never replace another, is understanding ... what bereavement is." Remembering can also bring comfort: "It is only then, in this point of remembering, that I can disregard the great distance in time and place and event and...take the few steps that are needed...to receive the blessing of the welcome she [a friend from the past] never failed to give."

The capturing of memories - imagining them and committing them to words and making them into a story - is an apt definition for the art of the novel. Elizabeth Jolley's creation of the life and times of Vera Wright is a beautiful, rich, and layered masterpiece.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seventeen Vera Wright had other plans for her life than going to college like her parents had dreamed for her. Vera drops out of school and becomes a nurse in the military. This new direction in Vera’s life brings on many interesting circumstances that Vera never imagined. Along the way Vera grows up into a wonderful woman, mother and wife.

It is a shame that Ms. Jolley has passed away as I did enjoy this trilogy. This trilogy is an autobiographical novel that spans from the 130s to the 150s. You could feel the passion that Ms. Jolley had writing this stories. Through the course of this book you got to see Vera grow up and become a strong woman, though all that she experienced. This is a plus because most of everything Vera went through was taken from experiences that author, Jolley experienced herself. At almost 600 hundred pages, I read this book with ease. Vera went on an adventure and found love along the way. I plan to check out more of Elizabeth Jolley’s prior work.

[Christy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many writers explore the murky waters of memory but in this autobiographical trilogy Jolley recreates the way memories work - circularly, like a symphony. We follow Vera from her provincial childhood, her nursing during the Blitz, and her love affair, to her emigration to Australia. Jolley's prose is elegant but not brittle, lyrical but not sentimental, as she writes with "ruthless self-examination."

[Brooke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful surprise - I had never heard of this author until a recommendation came my way. Powerful voice, singular and rare in that it's a story about a single mother and yet that particular relationship (mother/child) is almost entirely absent from the book. Truly enjoyed it.

[Ann O'Connell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only read the first portion of the trilogy "My Father's Moon". I had a hard time following the events and the overall plot.

[Jeannie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I could not finish this. The main character was just too annoying. A truly depressing book.

[Lesley Moseley · Rating 4 out of 5]

beloved author of mine.