Barbara Hanrahan (1939–1991)
Forfatter af The Scent of Eucalyptus
Om forfatteren
Værker af Barbara Hanrahan
Associated Works
Goodbye to Romance: Stories by New Zealand and Australian Women Writers, 1930-1988 (1989) — Bidragyder — 10 eksemplarer
Satte nøgleord på
Almen Viden
- Juridisk navn
- Hanrahan, Barbara Janice
- Fødselsdato
- 1939
- Dødsdag
- 1991
- Køn
- female
- Nationalitet
- Australia
- Fødested
- Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
- Bopæl
- Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
London, England, UK - Uddannelse
- Thebarton Primary School
Thebarton Technical School
Adelaide Teachers' College
South Australian School of Arts
Royal College of Art - Erhverv
- novelist
printmaker
painter
Medlemmer
Anmeldelser
Barbara Hanrahan (1939-1991) was a notable Australian author who went to England in 1963 to continue her studies in art, returning to Adelaide in the early 1980s. She made an impressive career here and internationally as a painter and printmaker, and you can see some of her artworks here at the Art Gallery of NSW. But she also merits a whole column entry in the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature where they say that she was stimulated to begin writing by the death of her grandmother in 1968. You can see her list of works at Wikipedia but it’s the Companion that describes her themes and style:
Although my copy of the Companion predates the publication of A Chelsea Girl by three years, and the setting is London not Adelaide, those preoccupations are certainly on display in the novel. It took a while for me to become absorbed in the plot because – as you might expect with a setting in overcrowded working-class London at the turn of the 20th century, there are multiple characters tumbling over each other in a collage and it’s a bit hard to keep track of them all in an episodic novel. However, Sarah’s first-person narrative is vivid and Hanrahan has captured a working-class tone without overdoing it and making it a trial to read. (Though I did have to Google for the meaning of goffer (crimp or flute (a lace edge or frill) with heated irons) and for blooming sight mooby (which remains a mystery).
The book cover illustration is by Barbara Hanrahan.
To see the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/05/19/a-chelsea-girl-by-barbara-hanrahan-bookrevie...… (mere)
A writer with a plain but suggestive prose style, Hanrahan is a brilliant creator of atmosphere. She is particularly preoccupied with the contrast between the prim respectability of nineteenth-century society, especially Adelaide society, and its seamy or horrific underside. She has described Adelaide as a ‘terribly sinister place’, and sees her novels as ‘concerned with contrasts, contradictions, beauty and horror, love and death, frivolity and menace; the precisely-detailed world of substance, the darker world of instinct; the queerness of mind split from body, the absurd fantasy of the “ordinary”. (Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, edited by William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1985, ISBN 0195542339 p.315)
Although my copy of the Companion predates the publication of A Chelsea Girl by three years, and the setting is London not Adelaide, those preoccupations are certainly on display in the novel. It took a while for me to become absorbed in the plot because – as you might expect with a setting in overcrowded working-class London at the turn of the 20th century, there are multiple characters tumbling over each other in a collage and it’s a bit hard to keep track of them all in an episodic novel. However, Sarah’s first-person narrative is vivid and Hanrahan has captured a working-class tone without overdoing it and making it a trial to read. (Though I did have to Google for the meaning of goffer (crimp or flute (a lace edge or frill) with heated irons) and for blooming sight mooby (which remains a mystery).
The book cover illustration is by Barbara Hanrahan.
To see the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/05/19/a-chelsea-girl-by-barbara-hanrahan-bookrevie...… (mere)
Barbara Hanrahan [1939-1991] was a South Australian printmaker and novelist. She kept a diary of most days from 1967 until the last month of her life, when cancer and the therapies to which she was subjected impaired her sight, coordination and eventually deprived her of consciousness. Elaine Lindsay has pared the volume of the diaries to a selection of about 350 pages, with a brief prefatory account of Hanrahan’s life. The diaries are a record the working life of a writer and artist; they are unlikely to be of interest unless one has read some at least of the novels and unless one knows the style of the lithographs, etchings, woodcuts and linocuts.
After some hesitation, I have given the Diaries a five star rating, though I would not rate even the best of Hanrahan’s novels so highly. She is a minor provincial artist and writer. The novels are comparable in their considerable virtues and rewards to those of the similarly provincial Shropshire writer, Mary Webb (‘Precious Bane’, &c), with whom Hanrahan shared an acute pantheistic perception of the world and its people. The Diaries, however, are an intensely personal account of an artist’s evolving consciousness. They are often witty, often experimental in their techniques of observation and description, often bitchy and frequently naked in their exposure of Hanrahan’s ambition, her fragility and her occasional volcanic tantrums. So, after hesitation, there seemed no alternative to a five star ranking for a book that is an example of excellence of its kind, as a record of a particular artist’s creative life.
I read Hanrahan’s diaries slowly, over a couple of weeks, taking in a few days at a time. That seemed to me the best way to read a journal which is almost always concerned with the immediacy of her perceptions of the world and the translation of those perceptions into images or words. Over her last painful years of suffering, which could be grotesque in its humiliations, Hanrahan continued to write, resembling one of Samuel Beckett’s protagonists who must go on despite increasing debilitation, unwinding the spool of consciousness. But Hanrahan, unlike the Beckett unnameables, was never bleak. She cultivated throughout her life a child’s clarity of perception, vulnerability and optimistic faith in a spectrum of personal deities. Courage that is cheerful and bright is no less moving than grim determination to see things through.
Elaine Lindsay’s editing is unobtrusive. Her selection of entries eliminates the merely pedestrian accounts of unmemorable events and eliminates, too, some of Hanrahan’s acerbic or scathing descriptions and comments that could have caused needless pain to people still living. Those exclusions would have been approved by Hanrahan, who was acutely sensitive to derogatory comment or criticism on her own account and often felt guilty about the freedom she allowed herself in the privacy of the diaries to scarify her contemporaries. There is a very detailed index to compensate for the almost complete absence of running notes in the text. Lindsay made a conscious choice to avoid distracting editorial clutter and present the diary entries as a transparent record of consciousness. It would have been better, however, if some unobtrusive way could have been found to indicate when days had been excluded. Hanrahan was not rigid in keeping a daily record; every now and then she makes a little apology to her diary for a day or days neglect. I would have liked to know which of the elisions were a consequence of editorial choice. The other criticism to be made is that very few of Hanrahan’s prints are shown. A selection of some of the works to which she refers most often in the diaries would have enhanced the transparency of the record.… (mere)
After some hesitation, I have given the Diaries a five star rating, though I would not rate even the best of Hanrahan’s novels so highly. She is a minor provincial artist and writer. The novels are comparable in their considerable virtues and rewards to those of the similarly provincial Shropshire writer, Mary Webb (‘Precious Bane’, &c), with whom Hanrahan shared an acute pantheistic perception of the world and its people. The Diaries, however, are an intensely personal account of an artist’s evolving consciousness. They are often witty, often experimental in their techniques of observation and description, often bitchy and frequently naked in their exposure of Hanrahan’s ambition, her fragility and her occasional volcanic tantrums. So, after hesitation, there seemed no alternative to a five star ranking for a book that is an example of excellence of its kind, as a record of a particular artist’s creative life.
I read Hanrahan’s diaries slowly, over a couple of weeks, taking in a few days at a time. That seemed to me the best way to read a journal which is almost always concerned with the immediacy of her perceptions of the world and the translation of those perceptions into images or words. Over her last painful years of suffering, which could be grotesque in its humiliations, Hanrahan continued to write, resembling one of Samuel Beckett’s protagonists who must go on despite increasing debilitation, unwinding the spool of consciousness. But Hanrahan, unlike the Beckett unnameables, was never bleak. She cultivated throughout her life a child’s clarity of perception, vulnerability and optimistic faith in a spectrum of personal deities. Courage that is cheerful and bright is no less moving than grim determination to see things through.
Elaine Lindsay’s editing is unobtrusive. Her selection of entries eliminates the merely pedestrian accounts of unmemorable events and eliminates, too, some of Hanrahan’s acerbic or scathing descriptions and comments that could have caused needless pain to people still living. Those exclusions would have been approved by Hanrahan, who was acutely sensitive to derogatory comment or criticism on her own account and often felt guilty about the freedom she allowed herself in the privacy of the diaries to scarify her contemporaries. There is a very detailed index to compensate for the almost complete absence of running notes in the text. Lindsay made a conscious choice to avoid distracting editorial clutter and present the diary entries as a transparent record of consciousness. It would have been better, however, if some unobtrusive way could have been found to indicate when days had been excluded. Hanrahan was not rigid in keeping a daily record; every now and then she makes a little apology to her diary for a day or days neglect. I would have liked to know which of the elisions were a consequence of editorial choice. The other criticism to be made is that very few of Hanrahan’s prints are shown. A selection of some of the works to which she refers most often in the diaries would have enhanced the transparency of the record.… (mere)
A deliciously lyrical but accessible novel about growing up in Australia in the 1940s and 1950s, and yet not confined to the themes of those times. Read my full review at Whispering Gums: http://whisperinggums.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/barbara-hanrahan-the-scent-of-euc...
Hæderspriser
Måske også interessante?
Associated Authors
Statistikker
- Værker
- 19
- Also by
- 1
- Medlemmer
- 310
- Popularitet
- #76,069
- Vurdering
- 4.2
- Anmeldelser
- 4
- ISBN
- 50
- Sprog
- 1
- Udvalgt
- 2
Anyway, Hanrahan was just the author that I wanted to read after the emotionally draining experience of reading The Woman in Valencia (La femme de Valence), by Annie Perreault, translated by Ann Marie Boulanger. I wanted to read a novel featuring assertive women who took control of their lives, and Where the Queens all Strayed seemed like a title with promise. I wasn't disappointed.
Where the Queens all Strayed is a coming-of-age novel set at the turn of the 19th century. Thea Hodge, aged twelve, is the narrator and though she doesn't always understand what's going on, she is a keen observer of her family and the people of her small community in the Adelaide Hills. She has an older sister Meg who is the victim of her mother's fantasy about snaring the local posh boy, Teddy Teakle. Thea has doubts about this, because her father is from a dubious Adelaide suburb and she suspects that the Teakles, made rich by their jam factory, are unlikely to be conned into 'marrying down' even by Mother's best efforts at dressing Meg in finery. (Teddy is entranced enough, however, to cause Meg the kind of trouble that girls got into before birth control, but not entranced enough to marry her.)
But that's not the only straying that Meg does...
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/09/09/where-the-queens-all-strayed-by-barbara-hanr...… (mere)