Theory & Practice
Winner of the 2025 Stella Prize
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3.9 • 18 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
It’s 1986, and ‘beautiful, radical ideas’ are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a ‘deconstructed’ relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray.
Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain.
Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.
Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka. She lives in Warrane/Sydney on unceded Gadigal land. An honorary associate of the English Department at the University of Sydney, she has won several awards for her fiction. Theory & Practice is her seventh novel.
‘Michelle de Krestser, one of the best writers in the English language, has written her most brilliant book yet. It is, in short, a masterpiece.’ Neel Mukherjee
'Thrillingly original.’ Sigrid Nunez, author of The Vulnerables
‘A hugely talented author.’ Sarah Waters
‘One of the living masters of the art of fiction.’ Max Porter
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice is a striking blend of the political and the personal. It follows an introspective 24-year-old living in 1980s Melbourne, pursuing a Masters degree and obsessed with Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s private diaries and public writings provide a thematic framework, and the novel unfolds like a diary filled with detailed ordinary moments and musings on Woolf’s wisdom. It’s elegantly fragmented with reflections on art, history, and identity and sharp critiques of colonialism and late capitalism amidst vivid, tactile imagery and expressions of youthfulness. De Kretser’s writing is simultaneously lyrical and precise, pulsing with energy and insight. Theory & Practice is a novel that lingers, much like the broader societal issues that still echo in Australia today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sharp-witted and mesmerizing outing from de Kretser (The Life to Come), a Melbourne graduate student navigates the disconnect between her feminist ideals and her messy love life. The unnamed narrator, who's writing a thesis about the portrayal of gender in Virginia Woolf's novels, recounts her childhood in Sri Lanka, where she was sexually abused by a British man at 11. She went on to embrace feminism, and she struggles now with French post-structuralist theory, which is in vogue on the Melbourne campus, because of its indifference to feminist issues and her desire to upend the patriarchy ("One could not overthrow the Father, who was always already dead, although his phallus was everywhere in society and culture"). She also ruminates on contemporary Australian films, such as Gillian Leahy's Life Without Steve, which follows a woman over one year as she attempts to move on from an affair. The film resonates with the narrator because of her own tortured love affair with a fellow student who remains committed to his girlfriend ("I thought, I didn't know that this could be art. It was the first time I'd seen my everyday, unglamorous world in a film"). The narrator also vacillates between prizing intellectual theorizing or direct action, reflecting on the anticolonial resistance of Ceylonese activist E.W. Perera. Taken together, the narrator's clever political insights and beautiful depictions of art and literature offer readers a view into a captivating mind. De Kretser is at the top of her game.
Customer Reviews
Sweet Virginia
Setting
St Kilda, Victoria, 1986
Precis
Sri Lankan born female English graduate from Sydney moves to Melbourne to do a doctorate on Virginia Woolf. Seduces another chick’s BF. Worries she’s betraying her values, and wonders what Virginia would have done. (Screwed the guy’s brains out, I’d say, based on what I’ve read of, and about, Ms Woolf.)
Writing
An “innovative blend of fiction, memoir and nonfiction” according the blurb. I’d call it derivative rather than innovative. Rachel Cusk, for one, has been doing this sort of thing for a while. Ms de K does write artfully, if circuitously at times, but doesn’t end up saying much. Of course, I’m just an old white guy. What would I know?
Classic
Reads like a classic novel, loved it !