Miss Peabody’s Inheritance – Elizabeth Jolley (1983) | the reading log (book review) blog: the novel and novella, fiction and non-fiction.

peabody

NUMBER: 105

Genre: Fiction; Origin: Australia; Pages: 150

Satisfaction rating: 7.0

OVERVIEW:

A tale of love and loneliness in two parallel stories. Arabella Thorne, a cultured and eccentric schoolmistress, travels to Europe accompanied by a shy schoolgirl and the jealous Miss Edgely. Meanwhile, the Australian novelist Diana Hopewell answers a letter from Miss Peabody, an incompetent clerical worker living in a London suburb, and the ensuing correspondence between the two women changes Miss Peabody’s life and personality dramatically.

MATTHEW’S COMMENTS:

There is no doubt that Jolley’s The Well had a lingering effect on me, while I don’t think it was perfect I have since given it to two people to read and find myself thinking often of it. After just this one novella I was pretty sure that Jolley’s work would feature highly in my log over the years to come. But my interest is not just in her work, to be honest I’m fascinated by the woman. First and foremost is the fact that she didn’t have her first book published until she was over 50 years old, then followed she made hay while the sun shone completing over 15 works before her death in 2007 at 84.

I was given a recently published biography of Jolley, but before getting stuck in I thought that I should really read at least one more book to give me some greater context to the account of her life. I went into a second hand book shop and bought the cheapest work I could find, that how I ended up with a $3 copy of Miss Peabody’s Inheritance. It was a lucky dip that in many ways paid off.

In short, the book didn’t quite pack the punch of The Well, but it does display Jolley’s ability to breakdown traditional narrative structures and create a unified theme from disparate characters and tangents. This willingness to experiment bodes well for her more accomplished works that I plan to tackle over the next few months. Whereas The Well was an essay of power filtered through a gothic fairytale of an old lady, a young girl and a farmhouse, Miss Peabody’s Inheritance takes more of a comedic approach to exploring a similar dark tone.

While Jolley’s story is far from the confronting Lolita, the reader does find themselves at times amused by the subversive undertones of Miss Thorne’s pedophilic tendencies. But this story within a story is little more than a metaphor that offers the downtrodden Peabody cause to act. The Well is a book of manipulation, this book is one of liberation.

For those seeking comparisons, it is clear that many of the character traits, particularly those of Edgely and Peabody, share those of Theodora Goodman in Patrick White’s The Aunts Story. But dare I say it, better developed by Jolley.

FURTHER REFERENCES:

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Miss Peabody’s Inheritance – Elizabeth Jolley (1983)

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