Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well (1986)
Obsession, lamingtons, fey old ladies
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Hello,
This week I look at Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well, recommended to me ages ago by my oldest friend, the Jolley-loving writer Emma McEwin. If you haven’t read it, I recommend it; the back cover of my Penguin edition gives away more than I do below.
If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere and a lamington has never passed your lips, this is a lamington.
Happy Sunday.
Sam
The Well by Elizabeth Jolley (1923-2007) begins with an epigraph:
‘What have you brought me Hester? What have you brought me from the shop?’
‘I’ve brought Katherine, Father,’ Miss Harper said. ‘I’ve brought Katherine, but she’s for me.’1
The opening then reveals that Father, Hester and Katherine are characters in the novel – Father is a Western Australian wheat farmer, Hester an ageing and lonely eccentric in need of a companion, Katherine a young orphan in need of a home – so in a playfully postmodern way, Jolley provides her book with an epigraph from itself. When the passage occurs on page 9, there’s more playfulness, as the text is slightly different:
‘What have you brought me then?’ her father, holding his whisky towards the setting sun, said as if asking for chocolate biscuits or sweets supposedly hidden in the groceries being unpacked.
‘I’ve brought Katherine, father,’ Miss Harper said, indicating with a toss of her head where Katherine should put the sack of sugar she was dragging across the boards. ‘But she’s for me,’ she added.
Later in the novel, there are two funny episodes when in the shop the well-off and shamelessly entitled Hester helps herself to an unpaid-for lamington:
She was suddenly overcome with hunger. Unable to battle with the pangs she selected a lamington roll from the edge of the counter. Tearing off its clear wrapper she ate the whole cake enjoying every large mouthful and letting the white shreds of coconut litter her black bodice.
As an epigraph should, Jolley’s gives us a whiff of her novel’s theme, and by not reproducing it word for word in her text, she, like Hester, gets to have her lamington and eat it. Look at how in the epigraph but not the text there are repetitions of both ‘What have you brought me?’ and ‘I’ve brought Katherine’; and at how in the text Katherine seems to become one of the groceries. This is crafty writing: by the time we get to the bottom of page 9, we’ve read ‘brought’ six times. Without us realising, Jolley’s theme – obsession/possession – has not merely been passed under our noses but forced down our throats, and we are replete with the knowledge that Hester has not so much brought home Katherine as bought Katherine.
The Well is a kind of Gothic thriller which starts, thrillingly, in medias res. On the way home from a party in town thrown by the farm’s new owners (Hester sells it after her father dies; the women move to an isolated shepherd’s cottage at the edges of the property) Hester’s Toyota, driven by Katherine, collides into something.
What this is, or what it is not, and what happens in consequence, or does not, are the novel’s mysteries – the event either serves or threatens Hester, who loves Katherine and is determined to keep her.
It’s a compelling portrayal of an obsessive and the object of her obsession: Hester and Katherine are, perhaps, precursors to Barbara and Sheba in Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal. The Well is not a first-person narrative, but as in the Heller, we are only privy to the interior life of the obsessive; everyone else is seen from Hester’s perspective. Being with her is by turns exhilarating, funny, moving, and terrifying.
After I finished The Well, I returned to the Australian novelist Tim Winton’s The Boy Behind the Curtain (2016) to have another look at his essay ‘Remembering Elizabeth Jolley’. In the late 1970s, Jolley was Winton’s teacher at what is now Curtin University. He is admiring of her, but not reverential:
When it came to such things as discretion, charm and oblique professionalism, Elizabeth had no peer. She had a passive-aggressive genius, a gentle way of patronizing while appearing to be patronized, indulging while seeming to be indulged […] She might have looked the fey old lady in sandals but her survival instincts were keen. For someone with such an unbusinesslike mien, she was rather good at taking care of business – and then covering her tracks. In one form or another she saw the value in deft representation. In life and in work, she’d been forced to take the long view.2
I’m falling prey to the biographical fallacy here, but I found this striking, as all of it could apply to the (anti-)heroine of The Well. The passive-aggressive genius, the indulging while seeming to be indulged, the taking care of business then covering her tracks: all are characteristics of the crafty and elusive Hester, the woman who gets away with wolfing down lamingtons before paying for them, and bringing home an orphan as if she were a packet of chocolate biscuits.
Just as Winton enjoys establishing how Jolley wasn’t all she seemed, establishing whether Hester is manipulative – whether she rescues Katherine or ensnares her – is part of the fun of The Well. It’s ambiguous, because the relationship between Hester and Katherine is mutually dependent, and, unlike Barbara in Notes on a Scandal, Hester never seems an outright monster. This is partly because she has a winning capacity to be honest with herself (as Barbara does not), and partly because (like Barbara) she has the deliciously self-important vocabulary and ‘long view’ of a well-educated ‘fey old lady’.
Winton doesn’t rate The Well, and is critical of the dialogue in Jolley’s novels: ‘she had a tin ear for talk, unless characters spoke Edwardian or Mittel-European’.3 He’s right about the dialogue: Katherine’s never rings true, but Hester’s does, because she is a bit Mittel-European, a bit Edwardian. Jolley, in Australia from 1959, was a governess-educated Englishwoman who as the daughter of an Austrian aristocrat grew up speaking German.4 As a child, Hester has a German governess and takes a ‘small Grand Tour’ of Europe; she speaks German and French; she is cushioned by inherited money. And with her ‘maidenly mind’, she is unavoidably an Edwardian spinster straight out of A Room with a View, a kind of lamington-loving Miss Lavish or Charlotte Bartlett of the wheat-fields.
Somehow, this hemisphere-straddling works, and Jolley makes a dark European fairy tale at home in the drought-stricken paddocks of Western Australia. Near the cottage is the well of the title. It is home in the women’s imaginations to a very European ‘troll with horrible anti-social habits’; and also the portal to a particularly Australian mythology. The cottage has an old (European) orchard, and a line of (native) trees along its boundary, which, her father tells Hester,
suggested that there was water flowing under the earth, probably over a rock face a long way down. These old trees, he said, more than likely had their feet deep in sweet water […] beyond the reach of men.
It’s extraordinary, as the longed-for sweet water beneath the parched Australian soil begins to rise, how powerfully emblematic of the women’s desire the well becomes.
The final section embraces postmodernism again with a very 1980s literary theory-type deconstruction of the art of storytelling – of the stories we tell ourselves, of Hester’s story, of the story we’re reading. It’s another of Jolley’s playful tricks, and like so much of the novel it shouldn’t work, but is so clever that it does. A part of me wants to dismiss The Well as so much sub-Gothic, sub-queer, sub-Forsterian, sub-postmodern tosh. But Hester is a crafty character and Jolley a crafty writer, and her eat-the-whole-lamington-without-appearing-to style had me hooked from her epigraph to her ending.
Elizabeth Jolley, The Well (Ringwood: Viking Penguin, 1986; repr. Ringwood: Penguin [n.d.; presumably 1997]), p. ix. Subsequent quotations are from pp. 9-10, 18, 28, 32, 70, 156, 171.
Tim Winton, ‘Remembering Elizabeth Jolley’, in The Boy Behind the Iron Curtain: Notes from an Australian Life (Melbourne: Hamish Hamilton, 2016; repr. London: Picador, 2017), pp. 259-73 (pp. 265-6).
Winton, p. 266.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/mar/06/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries [accessed 25 June 2023].
Sounds intriguing!
Intriguing. Thanks for reawakening my interest in Elizabeth Jolley who I read thirty years ago. Now planning to return to her.