Reviewed by Ian Lipke
Helen Trinca’s powerful novel binds the reader’s attention to the page with arms of steel. While novels of this sort often hold attention readily enough, Trinca’s text never lets go. She holds until readers realize that s/he has no wish to see the book abandoned. Rather she has become fully involved in the life that Trinca tells.
Setting out to explain why Elizabeth ceased writing mid-career, Trinca takes her readers back to early childhood when insensitive parents followed their own pursuits at the expense of their ‘wounded, divorced child’. While the times were ignorant of the effects of virtual abandonment, parents’ responsibility for the welfare of their children cannot be shed.
When the family moved from Newcastle to Sydney, Elizabeth Harrower was twelve, on the verge of adulthood when views of significant elders are being formed in the minds of their children. Elizabeth was about to leave behind the difficult years ‘”as the ’divorced child’ who had faced careless, sometimes neglectful, adults” (13). Yet it was a gritty world (Trinca’s description) that faced the family, a world where the young Elizabeth had to negotiate dangerous emotional terrain. From this point in Elizabeth’s life, Trinca probes the contradictions of a woman who wielded extraordinary insight into others’ lives but guarded her own fiercely. An avid reader always, she equipped herself with the writings of Blixen, Ibsen and Shakespeare, to name but a few.
Plans to travel to England and Scotland were exciting for the new traveller. However, Helen Trinca’s location of Elizabeth’s ‘puppy-love’ for her boss is skilfully placed. It precedes the much more significant love for Margaret Dick, an infatuation that continues for much of the book, “absolutely part of the furniture of her life” (29). Several pages are devoted to the Margaret Dick biography, a passage well justified by the huge influence she has on the main character.
For more than five years in the 1950s in London Elizabeth Harrower lived in rundown flats and bedsits where the main game was to write. This produced Down in the City; her routine always to write six days a week, aiming for four foolscap pages, double-spaced, every day. Publishers were not interested until Cassell agreed to print it. Down in the City was followed by The Long Prospect, a story of adult moral corruption seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl. This book was followed by The Catherine Wheel, a story of bedsits and flats in a city smothered in a dense fog. “At one level, it’s a realist novel about an impossible passion for an unstable, unpredictable man; at another it’s a searing psychological case study” (47). As Trinca comments, to have produced three novels in less than five years was impressive.
Looking for Elizabeth is much more than the story of three novels, fascinating though they might be. Trinca writes about one of the most fascinating eras in Australian culture. She brings to life, in full colour, the literary circles of this period. Gwen Meredith, Max Harris, and Patrick White fell among Harrower’s literary friends, while Kylie Tennant, Gough Whitlam, Judah Waten, Kit and Shirley Hazzard represented a wide variety of other social groups.
Yet a mystery remains. Elizabeth struggled to find space to write, yet others not so dedicated to their craft, managed to do so. While her cooperation with Kylie Tennant was strained at this time, Kylie was in denial. I suspect that Elizabeth Harrower will have taken the reason she stopped writing so abruptly to her grave.
A magnificent book which, at every step, asked yet more questions.
Looking for Elizabeth
(2025)
by Helen Trinca
La Trobe University Press
ISBN:9781760645755
$36.99;320pp