But there was nowhere to access a lifetime of Elizabeth’s letters in an easily read form.Īs I edited the letters (yes, this time I really was the editor), my understanding of Elizabeth Macarthur shifted again, in the way your knowledge of a friend deepens and complicates over time. The handwritten originals are held at the Mitchell Library in Sydney. But a book of her letters would tell another kind of truth, and unravel yet another layer of story.Ī few of Elizabeth’s earliest letters had been published in the 1980s by the forward-thinking historian Joy Hughes, and others in a Macarthur family history from 1914. I didn’t regret the novel – it had its own job to do. That uneasiness sent me back to read the letters again. In telling a story about false stories, I might have created one myself. I’d hijacked her – to put it brutally – and imposed my own speculations on her. īut the game I was playing was almost too successful: some readers thought the book really was a long-lost memoir. Playing with those ideas was a great pleasure, and I was happy with the novel – which ended up with the less schoolmarmy title of A Room Made of Leaves. Elizabeth Macarthur and the secret memoir I was going to write for her was a way I could foreground the unreliable nature of storytelling as much as the story itself. I had the title for the book before I started to write: Do Not Believe Too Quickly.
#Sorty books with elizabeth how to
How to look behind the story that dominates, to see the one that’s been hidden? In the Australian context, the story about settlement and pioneers that the colonists have been telling each other for 200 years has, until recently, obliterated the one about invasion and dispossession. But that partial, simplified or false story can be powerful enough to obliterate any others. No writing is a transparent window into a reality: the writer always has an aim that shapes their choices, whether or not they’re aware of it. That idea offered a way to write about a theme I’ve been circling for my whole writing life: the unreliability of any version of “truth”. What if she’d written a secret memoir and hidden it away? What if it had come to light, and somehow found its way into my hands, and I’d transcribed and edited it? Here was Elizabeth, stuck in an awful marriage in an awful situation, but unable to write freely about any of it, because the conventions of her time and place dictated that a woman should be devoted to her husband and uncomplaining about her life.īut she’d hardly be human if she didn’t want to record, somewhere, the truth behind her sunny fiction. I began to picture the letters as a magnificent piece of fiction, sustained over 60 years. Yet hardly a whisper of any of that appears in her cheerful letters.
#Sorty books with elizabeth full
Her home, the prison settlement of Sydney, was a miserable place full of violence, grief and ugliness. Elizabeth Macarthur was married to a man who – as his own letters show – was irascible, vindictive, manipulative, a bully. Between the lines I glimpsed something else.
0 kommentar(er)
