Sylvia Foley (fictional character) no relation London (place)
Jessica Margaret Anderson (née Queale; 25 September 1916 – 9 July 2010) was an Australian novelist and short story writer. Born in Gayndah, Anderson lived the bulk of her life in Sydney apart from a few years in London.  She began her career writing short stories for newspapers and drama scripts for radio, especially adaptations of well-known novels. Embarking on her career as a novelist relatively late in life - her first novel was published when she was 47 - her early novels attracted little attention. She rose to prominence upon the publication of her fourth novel, Tirra Lirra by the River, published in 1978. Although she remains best known for this work, several of her novels have garnered high acclaim, most notably The Impersonators (1980) and Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories (1987), both of which have won awards. She won the Miles Franklin Literary Award twice, and has been published in Britain and the United States. Jessica Anderson died at Elizabeth Bay, New South Wales in 2010, following a stroke. She was the mother of Australian screenwriter Laura Jones, her only child.Tirra Lirra by the River
Her greatest mainstream success, however, was to come in 1978 with the publication of her fourth novel, Tirra Lirra by the River. The title is a quote from Tennyson's great ballad, "The Lady of Shalott", which tells the tale of a female artist who meets a tragic end when she attempts to move beyond artistic isolation. The novel details the life of Nora Porteous, whose natural creativity is constrained by the fact that "she herself doesn't know that she's an artist. She struggles through, trying to arrive at her art and never succeeding." After thirty odd years away, Nora, now elderly, returns to Brisbane, where she spent her childhood. The novel is essentially a "personally commentated replay of a life," during which Nora recounts and reflects upon the events that have shaped the course of her life. Anderson chose to create a woman from a very specific era: born several decades before Anderson herself was alive, Nora would have lived through World War I, World War II and The Great Depression, in a time and pace where "artists, although they were known to exist, were supposed to exist elsewhere." Nora struggles to submerge her various artistic and unconventional selves in favour of a more socially acceptable constructed persona. Nora uses the "spinning globe," her equivalent of the Lady of Shalott's "crystal mirror," to explore the various stages and facets of her life, and to conceal some of its more unsavoury aspects from herself, and from the reader.The novel began its life as a 20,000-word novella, which was prize-winning in its own right. As it was an awkward length for a novel, publishers requested that Anderson extend the story, which she did following a trip to London in 1974. In 1975 Tirra Lirra was broadcast as a radio play, and in 1977 Macmillan Publishers in Melbourne accepted it for publishing. In the year of its publication, Tirra Lirra won the Australian Natives' Association Literary Award, and the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's most prestigious literary award. Anderson attributed its tremendous success in some degree to the fact that "it is less complex, I think. It's easier to read than most of my others."The Impersonators
Anderson's fifth novel, The Impersonators, published in 1980, won her the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award for the second time. The novel enjoyed further critical acclaim when, in 1981, it won the Christina Stead Fiction Award at the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards. Renamed The Only Daughter for publication in the United States, the novel details Sylvia Foley's return to Australia after having lived in England for twenty years. Having come to the conclusion that worldly possessions and marriage are the main stumbling blocks to achieving freedom, Sylvia returns to find each of her Australian relatives bound by both constraints, making them "impersonators."
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