Charmian Clift, this novel’s muse and model, was born the same year as Elizabeth Jolley. If she had lived to see the 1980s, that decade would almost certainly have given her a new lease of life as a writer. It was an idyllic time for Australian women writers; second-wave feminism brought in its wake a different kind of readership, a generation of adventurous publishers, and many opportunities for women writers to use new kinds of voices to say new kinds of things.

The 1980s offered these possibilities to women writers in their fifties and sixties, as well as to younger ones. Thea Astley’s writing, re-energised, took new directions; Olga Masters began to write superb fiction in the aftermath of her long career as a journalist; Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River (1978) made her name far more widely known than it had been hitherto; and publishers began to accept, for the first time, the fiction that Jolley had been writing and fruitlessly sending to them for years. Picture Clift in this company.