13 Facts About Amy Witting

Amy Witting was the pen name of an Australian novelist and poet born Joan Austral Fraser.

Amy Witting was widely acknowledged as one of Australia's "finest fiction writers, whose work was full of the atmosphere and colour or times past".

Amy Witting was born in the Sydney suburb of Annandale, and was brought up as a Catholic.

Amy Witting has "melancholy memories of a repressive family life" and remembered the nuns at her school, St Brendan's College, as being "obsessed with the torments of hell".

Amy Witting studied languages at the University of Sydney where she met, among others, James McAuley, Harold Stewart and Dorothy Auchterlonie Green.

Amy Witting's tuberculosis recurred in her early adulthood, resulting in her spending time in a sanitorium which "gave her, for a time, the peace and solitude she always craved".

On 28 July 1934, when Witting was 16, one of her poems, written under the pseudonym De Guesclin, was published in The Sydney Morning Herald.

Amy Witting married Les Levick, a fellow high school teacher, in 1948, and they had one son.

Amy Witting continued to write until her death, dying of cancer a few weeks after the publication of After Cynthia, her last novel, in 2001.

For most of Amy Witting's working life, teaching English and French, and making a living took priority, and writing was done only in her spare time.

Amy Witting's story outraged parents, politicians and teachers; the Minister for Education accused her of corrupting children and stated in Parliament that "Amy Witting is a scribbler on lavatory walls".

However, Amy Witting's success came late in life when, in retirement, she could spend more time on her writing.

Craven writes that "Amy Witting was a great master of realism, a naturalist who could render a nuance in a line that might take a lesser writer a page".