The Vera Wright Trilogy
My Father's Moon / Cabin Fever / The Georges' Wife
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
This moving masterpiece by one of Australia’s leading novelists—now in its entirety—inaugurates Persea’s series of Elizabeth Jolley revivals.
Set in 1940s wartime England, the trilogy follows young Vera, who leaves her cultivated Midlands home to become a nurse in a military hospital and is catapulted into adulthood through unorthodox love entanglements with both men and women, two illegitimate children, and finally emigration to Australia, where, from her new vantage point—now a doctor and writer—she looks back on her life’s journey. Combining the beauty of Virginia Woolf with the spare, heartbreaking insightfulness of Jean Rhys, the trilogy is both a literary tour de force and an accessible, universal portrait of a woman in search of sustaining love.
The concluding volume, The Georges’ Wife, is published here for the first time in the US. The first two volumes have long been out of print. North American readers can now experience “the most ambitious and accomplished work in Jolley’s oeuvre” (J. M. Coetzee).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The first two novels of this trilogy by the late Australian writer Jolley were issued in the U.S. in the 1980s, but the third was not available until now. Largely autobiographical, the novels provide a haunting portrait of a woman who came of age during WWII in England, forging her identity in courageous circumstances. My Father's Moon traces Vera's childhood, her experiences as a nurse in wartime London and her seduction and pregnancy by a womanizing physician. In Cabin Fever, Vera, poor and desperate, is exploited as a teacher at a dreadful boarding school. The Georges, the title characters in the third novel, are an elderly brother and sister in Glasgow who take in Vera as a maid. Vera has another daughter out of wedlock with Mr. George, with whom she moves to Australia in the 1950s. The books do not accrue to a conventional narrative, however. These facts, teased out from the repetition of seminal memories, like the shards of a kaleidoscope, are merely the bones of a lyrically written, imaginatively observed and emotionally compelling work.
