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The Tangled Garden: Memories of My Girlhood
Book by Coleman, Elizabeth
191 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1988
7 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Coleman
37 books43 followersElizabeth Coleman wrote her first novel when she was seven – that’s if you can call four pages in an old exercise book a novel.
She was a huge Enid Blyton fan and didn’t let the fact that she’d never been out of Australia deter her from writing a story about an English boarding school, full of girls having midnight feasts in the dorm and saying stuff like: ‘I say, we’re off to Cornwall for the hols!’
When her mum and dad gently suggested that she try writing about an Australian school, Elizabeth was appalled. Who cares about an Australian school? Not a midnight feast or a scary but benign matron in sight.
Elizabeth is the author of four published plays, including the smash hits Secret Bridesmaids' Business and It's My Party (And I'll Die If I Want To). Her theatre writing has also appeared in several anthologies. As a screenwriter Elizabeth adapted Secret Bridesmaids' Business into an award-winning ABC telemovie and has written for many of Australia's most popular dramas, including Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries and Bed of Roses, which she co-created with Jutta Goetze. Losing the Plot is her first novel.
She was a huge Enid Blyton fan and didn’t let the fact that she’d never been out of Australia deter her from writing a story about an English boarding school, full of girls having midnight feasts in the dorm and saying stuff like: ‘I say, we’re off to Cornwall for the hols!’
When her mum and dad gently suggested that she try writing about an Australian school, Elizabeth was appalled. Who cares about an Australian school? Not a midnight feast or a scary but benign matron in sight.
Elizabeth is the author of four published plays, including the smash hits Secret Bridesmaids' Business and It's My Party (And I'll Die If I Want To). Her theatre writing has also appeared in several anthologies. As a screenwriter Elizabeth adapted Secret Bridesmaids' Business into an award-winning ABC telemovie and has written for many of Australia's most popular dramas, including Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries and Bed of Roses, which she co-created with Jutta Goetze. Losing the Plot is her first novel.
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January 31, 2025
Coleman is my great grandmother so the 5* is biased. More realistically I read this as a teenager and it was lovely to learn about her early life but for most readers it will really appeal to students of cultural history, and people who love old fashioned family relationship stories and stories of how a person came from one place and made a different kind of life. In her 1st book she talks about going from the mining village where she grew up to Leominster to help her Dad keep house because he decided to go back to small farming. His wife and other children stayed behind.
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