‘Let a message be found’

In the opening pages of an early manuscript, ‘A Feast of Life’, Elizabeth Jolley ponders the question of whether a novel should have a message. She has no answer, but will write out of her ‘experiences and feelings’. If her writing does help anyone, then ‘let a message be found’, so that she might ‘feel that I am at least doing something in a wider sphere than the domestic routine within the walls of the little house’. Jolley goes on to describe her method: ‘I shall start in the early years of my life and try to make things take some sort of order but order is not a strong point with me and I shall write with all my heart so that there will be the noise of my children in these pages …’

This is the quotation that Brian Dibble chooses to open his biography of Elizabeth Jolley (1923–2007), and it evokes at once her meditative style and its experiential basis, as well as its celebrative quality. Her life was indeed a feast, though not always a palatable one. There is the desire, as urgent for her as the ambition to be a writer, to be of assistance to others, as well as a highly developed self-awareness. So much of Jolley’s non-fictional writing is similarly evocative and apparently revealing of her ‘experiences and feelings’ that somehow a biography seems redundant.