Elizabeth Jolley occupation nurse
Life
Jolley was born in Birmingham, England as Monica Elizabeth Knight, to an English father and Austrian-born mother who was the daughter of a high ranking Railways official. She grew up in the Black Country in the English industrial Midlands. She was educated privately until age 11, when she was sent to Sibford School, a Quaker boarding school near Banbury in Oxfordshire which she attended from 1934 to 1940.
At 17 she began training as an orthopaedic nurse in London and later in Surrey. She began an affair with one of her patients, Leonard Jolley (1914–1994), and subsequently became pregnant. Leonard Jolley was already married to Joyce Jolley, who was also pregnant. Elizabeth moved in with the Jolleys, and her daughter Sarah was born five weeks before the birth of Susan Jolley, the child of Leonard and Joyce.Elizabeth and Leonard subsequently emigrated to Australia in 1959 after they had married. They eventually had three children and Leonard was appointed chief librarian at the Reid Library at the University of Western Australia, a job he held from 1960–1979. Leonard told his family in England that it was Joyce and Susan with whom he had moved to Australia. For several years, Elizabeth wrote letters purportedly from Joyce and Susan to Leonard's British relatives. Leonard eventually asked his former wife to tell their daughter Susan that he had died.Elizabeth and Leonard lived in the riverside Perth suburb of Claremont. In 1970 they also bought a small orchard in Wooroloo, a town in the Darling Ranges approximately 60 kilometres inland from Perth.Elizabeth Jolley worked at a variety of jobs including nursing, cleaning, door-to-door sales and running a small poultry farm, and throughout this time she also wrote works of fiction including short stories, plays and novels. Her first book was published in 1976, when she was 53.
From the late 1970s, she taught writing at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, later Curtin University, and one of her students was another Australian novelist, Tim Winton. Her students have won many prizes including "several Australian/Vogel Awards (for a first novel), several different Premier's Awards, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Miles Franklin Award".She developed dementia in 2000, and died in a nursing home in Perth in 2007. Her death prompted many tributes in newspapers across Australia, and in The Guardian in the United Kingdom. Her diaries, stored at the Mitchell Library in Sydney, will be closed until after the deaths of her children or 25 years after her death.Andrew Riemer, the Sydney Morning Herald's chief book reviewer, wrote in his obituary for her, "Jolley could assume any one of several personas – the little old lady, the Central European intellectual, the nurse, the orchardist, the humble wife, the university teacher, the door-to-door salesperson – at the drop of a hat, usually choosing one that would disconcert her listeners, but hold them in fascination as well".On 16 November 2007, the performance of Johannes Brahms's A German Requiem by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, chorus and soloists, under conductor Lothar Zagrosek, was dedicated to Jolley, for whom the Requiem had been a great source of joy and inspiration.
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