19 Facts About Elizabeth Jolley

Monica Elizabeth Jolley was an English-born Australian writer who settled in Western Australia in the late 1950s and forged an illustrious literary career there.

Elizabeth Jolley was 53 when her first book was published, and she went on to publish fifteen novels, four short story collections and three non-fiction books, publishing well into her 70s and achieving significant critical acclaim.

Elizabeth Jolley was a pioneer of creative writing teaching in Australia, counting many well-known writers such as Tim Winton among her students at Curtin University.

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.

Elizabeth Jolley grew up in the Black Country in the English industrial Midlands.

Elizabeth Jolley 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.

Elizabeth Jolley began an affair with one of her patients, Leonard Jolley, and subsequently became pregnant.

Leonard Jolley was already married to Joyce Jolley, who was pregnant.

For several years, Elizabeth Jolley wrote letters purportedly from Joyce and Susan to Leonard's British relatives.

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 wrote works of fiction including short stories, plays and novels.

Elizabeth Jolley developed dementia in 2000, and died in a nursing home in Perth in 2007.

Elizabeth Jolley's death prompted many tributes in newspapers across Australia, and in The Guardian in the United Kingdom.

Elizabeth Jolley's diaries, stored at the Mitchell Library in Sydney, will be closed until after the deaths of her children or 25 years after her death.

Elizabeth Jolley began writing early in her twenties, but was not recognised until much later.

Elizabeth Jolley had many rejections by publishers, 39 in one year alone.

Elizabeth Jolley suggests that her eventual success owes a little to "the 1980s awareness of 'women's writing'", which had been catapulted to the mainstream after the success of other Australian female writers such as Helen Garner and Germaine Greer.

Elizabeth Jolley lapsed in her writing, discouraged by earlier failures, and was only to be published again in 1983 with Miss Peabody's Inheritance and Mr Scobie's Riddle.

Elizabeth Jolley wrote numerous radio plays broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and several of her poetic works were published in journals and anthologies during the 1980s and 1990s.

Elizabeth Jolley was made a professor of Creative Writing at Curtin University in 1998.