The nights belong to the woman writer : a meditation on women's writing practices in Elizabeth Jolley's Miss Peabody's Inheritance

Abstract

Elizabeth Jolley's Miss Peabody's Inheritance is a novel overtly concerned with women's writing practices and the conditions most conducive to creative expression. The first line of the narrative, "The nights belonged to the novelist,"1 signals a recurring motif throughout the text and presents an opportunity to analyse fictional representations of the night and writing. Night writing is a practice that appears in many variations across Western women's literary history; in Jolley's novel, the night fosters a time of literary and sexual experimentation in which women can explore their desires. Although Miss Peabody's Inheritance is widely acknowledged for its subversive female characters and exploration of lesbian desire, it is yet to receive substantial criticism on the significance of the night. Jolley scholarship considers the imaginative landscape of Miss Peabody's evenings; the magical, enchanting time so starkly juxtaposed with the mundanity of clerical work and oppressive domestic chores. Yet the complications and nuances of the night - both liberating and restrictive, fraught with contradictions - demand further attention. This study adopts a feminist critical perspective to analyse Jolley's novel as a meditation on women's writing practices and literary cultures. By applying a close, textual reading combined with biographical criticism, I consider the ways in which Jolley reflects on the tension between gender and writing within her fiction. In addition to proposing a new way of reading Jolley's novel, this study contributes to feminist literary scholarship on women's writing spaces. There is potential for this research to be extended by reading Jolley's work alongside other women writers, both local and international, who similarly draw upon the motif of night writing. Moreover, the themes on which Jolley meditates on in the novel have resonance with contemporary discussions on women's unpaid domestic labour, and this research has potential to contribute to ongoing feminist, political and economic discussions on gender disparity.

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English