'Over a fifty-year period, from 1944 to 1994, Thea Astley published a number of critical writings, including essays, newspaper articles and reviews, and short reflections and meditations on her craft. Despite a renewed interest in Astley’s work, however, most critical interrogations of her oeuvre focus on her novels, and more recently her poetry. As a result, Astley’s critical writing has not been afforded the same breadth and depth of investigation as her fiction. This lacuna is troubling, since Astley’s critical works are important not only for their insight, but for what they reveal about Astley’s self-representation, and in particular the dual identity that she embodied as both a teacher and a satirist. This article argues that these dual roles emerge clearly in Astley’s essays and in fact are inextricable from many of her works. Further, the tensions between these two personae — Astley as teacher and Astley as satirist — reveal natural overlaps with her imaginative writing, and reflect her changing ideas about fiction writing, literature, and education.' (Publication abstract)
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'George Brewster is the well-dressed explorer. As his career in journalism takes him from city to city, from mistress to mistress, he takes with him his ever-patient wife. Fastidious, pompous and master of the cliche, throughout it all George persists in the illusion that he is the smartest of men.'
Source: Publisher's blurb (Penguin ed.).
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Sound recording.
Works about this Work
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Will the Real Subject Please Stand Up? Autobiographical Voices in Biography
2021
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Life Writing , vol. 18 no. 1 2021; (p. 25-30) Essays in Life Writing 2021; (p. 24-29)'Biographers exist in a tight partnership with their chosen subject and there is often during the research and writing an equivalent reflective personal journey for the biographer. This is generally obscured, buried among an overwhelming magnitude of sources while the biographer is simultaneously developing the all-important ‘relationship’ required to sustain the narrative journey ahead. Questions and selections beset the biographer, usually about access to, or veracity of, sources but perhaps there are more personal questions that could be put to the biographer. The many works on the craft of biography or collections about the life-writing journey tell only some of this tale. It is not often enough, however, that we acknowledge how biography can be unusually ‘double-voiced’ in communicating a strong sense of the teller in the tale: the biographer’s own life experience usually does lead them to the biography, but also influences the shaping of the work. These are still ‘tales of craft’ in one sense, but autobiographical reflections in another. Perhaps this very personal insight can only be attempted in the ‘afterlife’ of biography; the quiet moments and years that follow such consuming works. In this article, I reflect on this unusually emotional form of life writing.' (Publication abstract)
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Double Trouble : The Teacher/Satirist Duality in Thea Astley’s Critical Writings
2019
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Queensland Review , December vol. 26 no. 2 2019; (p. 218-231) -
“Yrs Patrick” : Thea Astley’s Brush with Timely Advice on “The Rackety Career of Novel Writing”
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 72 no. 1 2012; (p. 53-65) 'Thea Astley had a difficult relationship with critical responses to her work throughout her entire writing life. Success - early or late career (for she had both) - did little to diminish the wounds she felt were inflicted when a reviewer or critic got to work on her "style". By the mid-1980s there were even some Australian literary scholars who were beginning to endorse Astley's own sense of critical foul play. Elizabeth Perkins wrote of Astley's fiction being the kind of writing which not only "disconcerts enthusiastic readers" but seems to render it "beyond the reach of the more usual modes of criticism" (Perkins 11; 17). Yet until now little has been said about how this state of affairs developed or how Astley, over time, came to deal with it - despite the many re - marks she made in interviews which indicate just how strange her relationship with her public persona as a writer actually was. Astley, for her part, became adept at deflection: her teenage poetry was "a form of acne" (Smith 43); she was "incapable of playing the game of the writertaking- himself-seriously seriously" (Astley, Kunapipi 21); she was just a "bit of a misfit" (Astley, Australian Voices 37) and later, more defensively, "I've worked all my life and I haven't had to time to be in the ghetto de Balmain" (Astley, Sunday Herald 3). One person who had an impact on Astley's self-regard at an early stage in her writing life was Patrick White. The record of the friendship has thus far rested on the evidence of its beginning and ending, detailed in David Marr's biography Patrick White: A life (1991) yet a letter White wrote to Astley in 1961, and which Astley kept from view and from publication in Marr's subsequent collection of White's letters, is a critical new source from which we can interpret the influence of White's mentoring of Astley.' (Author's abstract)
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Thea Astley : Writing in Overpoweringly a Male Dominated Literary World
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Indian Review of World Literature in English , July vol. 6 no. 2 2010; This paper is an attempt to explore different themes in the novels of Thea Astley.(p. 1) -
Thea Astley : Exploring the Centre
2004
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Subverting the Empire : Explorers and Exploration in Australian Fiction 2004; (p. 97-144)
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Miles Franklin Award '63
1963
single work
review
— Appears in: Realist Writer , November no. 13 1963; (p. 24)
— Review of The Well Dressed Explorer 1962 single work novel ; The Cupboard Under the Stairs 1962 single work novel -
One of the Year's Best
1962
single work
review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 8 December 1962; (p. 17)
— Review of The Well Dressed Explorer 1962 single work novel -
Untitled
1962
single work
review
— Appears in: The Cairns Post , 22 December 1962; (p. 7)
— Review of The Well Dressed Explorer 1962 single work novel -
Untitled
1963
single work
review
— Appears in: The Critic , 19 July vol. 4 no. 4 1963; (p. 33-4)
— Review of The Well Dressed Explorer 1962 single work novel -
A Novel Chronicle
1964
single work
review
— Appears in: Prospect , vol. 7 no. 1 1964; (p. 27-29)
— Review of The Tilted Cross 1961 single work novel ; The Well Dressed Explorer 1962 single work novel ; The Cupboard Under the Stairs 1962 single work novel ; Tourmaline 1963 single work novel ; The Hollow Woodheap 1962 single work novel -
Thea Astley : A Woman among the Satirists of Post-war Modernity
2003
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Feminist Studies , November vol. 18 no. 42 2003; (p. 261-271) The article examines Astley's early satirical novels, asking the question, what do these early satires on gender relations share with those of her male contemporaries, and where do they differ? Are her suburbs and small towns vehicles for satire and ironies that blame women for the excesses and failures of modernity? Arguing that post-war modernism was a strongly masculinist culture which saw art defined by its distance to everyday life, popular values and middle-class consumerism, Sheridan concludes: 'To the extent that she shared this dominant masculinist aesthetic of the 1950s and 1960s, Astley's satirical stance involved her, inevitably, in a modernist rejection of this feminine modernity as innately trivial, distracting and undermining serious aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual values' (270). -
Thea Astley : Exploring the Centre
2004
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Subverting the Empire : Explorers and Exploration in Australian Fiction 2004; (p. 97-144) -
Thea Astley : Writing in Overpoweringly a Male Dominated Literary World
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Indian Review of World Literature in English , July vol. 6 no. 2 2010; This paper is an attempt to explore different themes in the novels of Thea Astley.(p. 1) -
The Multiple Effects of Thea Astley's Fiction
2002
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Hot Iron Corrugated Sky : 100 Years of Queensland Writing 2002; (p. 100-110) -
“Yrs Patrick” : Thea Astley’s Brush with Timely Advice on “The Rackety Career of Novel Writing”
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 72 no. 1 2012; (p. 53-65) 'Thea Astley had a difficult relationship with critical responses to her work throughout her entire writing life. Success - early or late career (for she had both) - did little to diminish the wounds she felt were inflicted when a reviewer or critic got to work on her "style". By the mid-1980s there were even some Australian literary scholars who were beginning to endorse Astley's own sense of critical foul play. Elizabeth Perkins wrote of Astley's fiction being the kind of writing which not only "disconcerts enthusiastic readers" but seems to render it "beyond the reach of the more usual modes of criticism" (Perkins 11; 17). Yet until now little has been said about how this state of affairs developed or how Astley, over time, came to deal with it - despite the many re - marks she made in interviews which indicate just how strange her relationship with her public persona as a writer actually was. Astley, for her part, became adept at deflection: her teenage poetry was "a form of acne" (Smith 43); she was "incapable of playing the game of the writertaking- himself-seriously seriously" (Astley, Kunapipi 21); she was just a "bit of a misfit" (Astley, Australian Voices 37) and later, more defensively, "I've worked all my life and I haven't had to time to be in the ghetto de Balmain" (Astley, Sunday Herald 3). One person who had an impact on Astley's self-regard at an early stage in her writing life was Patrick White. The record of the friendship has thus far rested on the evidence of its beginning and ending, detailed in David Marr's biography Patrick White: A life (1991) yet a letter White wrote to Astley in 1961, and which Astley kept from view and from publication in Marr's subsequent collection of White's letters, is a critical new source from which we can interpret the influence of White's mentoring of Astley.' (Author's abstract)
Awards
- 1962 joint winner Miles Franklin Literary Award
- Urban,
- Melbourne, Victoria,
- Sydney, New South Wales,
- Queensland,