NTA NET Guidance: specifically prepared based on previous questions.

Patrick White (1912-1990)

Australian Poet, Novelist, Essayist and Playwright, was born in England. The first Australian writer to achieve The Nobel Prize for literature in 1973. 

 

Notable Novels

• Happy Valley (1939)
• The Living and The Dead (1941)
• The Aunt's Story (1948)
• The Tree of Man (1955)
• Voss (1957)
• Riders in The Chariot (1961)
• The Solid Mandala (1966)
• The Eye of The Storm (1973)
• A Fringe of Leaves (1976)
• The Twyborn Affair (1979)

David Marr was his biographer. 

His most recognized Novel was Voss. It tells the story of a doomed attempt of Johann Voss to cross the Australian continent. Narrating the mystic and spiritual communion that ties him to Laura Trevelyan, who at home in Sydney suffers with him and released from fever at the moment of his death.   

The Novel is based on the life of a nineteenth century German(Prussian) explorer and Naturalist Ludwid Leichhardt, who faded away on the occasion of his expedition into the Australian outback.

 

The Eye of The Storm and A Fringe of Leaves created a powerful and bold female characters.

The Eye of The Storm unfolds the life of Elizabeth Hunter, the powerful matriarch, who maintains her boldness until her last breath.

 

"Dorothy was breathless with resentment for what she herself could no more than half-remember, had perhaps only half discovered - on the banks of the Seine? in dreams? as part of that greatest of all obsessions, childhood? and how could Elizabeth Hunter have got possession of anything so secret? Only Mother was capable of slicing in half what amounted to psyche, then expecting the rightful owner to share".  - The Eye of the Storm, Chapter Eight

 

  

While  A Fringe of Leaves revolves around the journey of Mrs.Ellen Roxburg with her much older husband Austin. It captures the real life of Aboriginal people in Australia

 

"... she fell back upon the dust, amongst intimations of the nightmare which threatened to re-shape itself around her. Her trembling only gradually subsided as she lay fingering the ring threaded into her fringe of leaves..."  P.223

 

The Twyborn Affair in some respect echoes Virginia Woolf''s Orlando. with its gender switching protagonist. The author portrays the transition of a soul through the different identities Eudoxia, Eddie, and Eadith, two of them are incognito as female.

 

Patrick White dedicated the novel Happy Valley to the Artist Roy De Maistre. 

 

The Living and The Dead represents the life after second world war.features mother Catherine, son Elyot and daughter Eden. they were leading a desperate life under a single roof. A claustrophobic ambiance permeates in the novel.

 

The Aunt's Story recounts the experiences of Theodora Goodman, a lonely middle aged woman. who travels to France after the death of her mother and then to America where she experiences a mental breakdown and an epiphanic revelation.

 

White himself expressed a personal fondness for it. he says : "It is the one i have most affection for.

and I always find it irritating that only 6 Australians seem to have liked it."

 

"The sun was still a manageable ball above the ringing hills as Lou went outside. She walked through this stiff landscape, carrying her cold and awkward hands. She thought about the cardboard aunt, Aunt Theodora Goodman, who was both a kindness and a darkness. Lou touched the sundial, on which the time had remained frozen. She was afraid, and sad, because there was some great intolerable pressure from which it is not possible to escape. Lou looked back over her shoulder, and ran."   -   The Aunt's Story.

 

One of the great opening lines : "But old Mrs.Goodman did die at last"

  

‘Lou’ was Theodora’s soulmate.

 

 The Tree of Man captures the domestic life featuring the lives of the Parker family and their changing fortunes over many decades. It is steeped in Australian folklore and cultural myth, and is recognized as the author's attempt to infuse the peculiar and unique way of life in the remote Australian bush with some sense of the cultural traditions and ideologies. 

 

White wrote, in an attempt to explain the novel, "I felt the life was, on the surface, so dreary, ugly, monotonous, there must be a poetry hidden in it to give it a purpose, and so I set out to discover that secret core, and The Tree of Man emerged."

 

The title comes from A.E Housman's Poetry Cycle A Shropshire Lad. 

 

The novel is one of three by White included in "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die". The others are Voss and The Living and The Dead.

 

 

Reference & for further reading

•  The Oxford companion to Australian literature        by   W. Wilde
• A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900    Editors: Rebecca McNeer,Nicholas Birns
• Encyclopedia Britanica