Thea Astley: Inventing Her Own Weather

This is the critically acclaimed, first-ever book-length biography of Thea Astley, one of Australia’s most highly awarded writers. In this comprehensive and accomplished portrait, Karen Lamb brings to vivid life one of the Australian literary world’s most complex characters. Thea Astley was raised in Brisbane, in a strict Catholic household in which hard work and the written word were highly prized. It was perhaps inevitable that this precocious scholarship girl would fulfil her sub-editor father’s unlived dreams of becoming a writer, though Thea was a wife and mother before her first book was published. Astley worked early in the morning and late at night, around teaching and family commitments, in order to carve out valuable writing time and in this way produced her first three novels:Girl with a Monkey, A Descant for Gossips (republished in 2015 in the UQP Modern Classics series) and The Well Dressed Explorer, which won the first of four Miles Franklin Awards she would receive. In her writing, Astley explored the issues most affecting her own life: the limited options open to women, the restrictions of marriage and motherhood, anxiety and depression, sexuality, fidelity and faith. Although she was uncomfortable with the word, Astley was in some ways an early feminist who raged against the widely accepted assumption that women’s writing was somehow less serious than men’s. Despite the success of her early books, Astley Karen Lamb is a Senior Lecturer in felt that the critical acclaim she so dearly craved eluded her literature at the Australian Catholic and blamed, in part, her gender. She was also an outspoken University, Sydney. She has held critic of the widely accepted idea that literary fiction writers teaching and research positions at the could not make a living from their craft, much to the University of Queensland, Monash discomfort of her publishers. But then, Thea’s sharp tongue University and the University of and sometimes prickly personality were no secret among Melbourne. those who knew her well. Thea Astley: Inventing Her Own Weather draws upon an unparalleled range of interviews and correspondence to Her research interests include Australian literature, life paint a fascinating picture: of Thea the woman, whose writing, and the cultural context of authorship. She has private anxieties and experiences were played out in her edited a book of Australian short stories, and published work, and of Astley the writer, whose literary legacy lives book chapters and articles on Australian authors, includ- on. ing a book on Peter Carey.

For more information about this book, visit UQP at She can be contacted at [email protected] http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au