Five Acre Virgin & Other Stories

Description

During her lifetime, Elizabeth Jolley established a formidable international reputation for her unique combination of unsentimental realism and original humour. Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories brings together two highly acclaimed collections of Jolley's short fiction in a new edition. Five Acre Virgin and The Travelling Entertainer introduced Jolley as a major Australian talent and she went on to win numerous awards, including the Age Book of the Year Award (three times) and the Miles Franklin Award. Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories includes an insightful foreword by Jolley's long-time agent and friend, Caroline Lurie, and is a great introduction to an unusual and celebrated artist.

Elizabeth Jolley was one of Australia's most celebrated writers, with a formidable international reputation. She was recognised in Australia with an AO for services to literature and was awarded Honorary Doctorates from Curtin University (1986); Macquarie (1995), Queensland (1997) and The University of New South Wales (2000). Born in England in 1923, she was brought up in a strict, German-speaking household and attended a Quaker boarding school. She became a nurse, married Leonard Jolley and with three children moved to Western Australia in 1959. In 1974 she started teaching creative writing at Fremantle Arts Centre. Although she wrote all her life, it was not until she was in her fifties that her books started to receive the recognition they deserved. She won The Age Book of the Year Award on three separate occasions (for Mr Scobie's Riddle, My Father's Moon and The Georges' Wife) and she won the Miles Franklin Award for The Well, as well as many other awards. Her last two novels published by Penguin were An Accommodating Spouse (1999) and An Innocent Gentleman (2001). Her non-fiction collection, Learning to Dance was published in 2006. Elizabeth Jolley died in 2007.