Fiction

ATN at risk

by Stephanie Trigg •

December 2005–January 2006, no. 277

Evil: A novel by Diane Bell

Spinifex, $24.95 pb, 289 pp, 1876756551

Fiction

ATN at risk

by Stephanie Trigg •

December 2005–January 2006, no. 277

‘Write about what you know.’ This is probably good advice for aspiring writers. Whether it serves equally well for academics turning their hand to prose fiction is put to a severe test by Diane Bell’s first novel. Evil tells the story of an Australian feminist anthropologist who takes up a position at a small Jesuit college in the US. Like many ATNs (Academics Turned Novelists), Bell’s choice of genre is the academic mystery: it is no coincidence that one of the heroine’s favourite writers is Amanda Cross, otherwise known as the feminist critic Carolyn Heilbrun.

Stephanie Trigg

Stephanie Trigg is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Melbourne, where she works on medieval and modern literature. She is author of Gwen Harwood (Oup, 1994) and several books on Chaucer and medieval studies: most recently, Affective Medievalism: Love, Abjection and Discontent (2019), and 30 Great Myths about Chaucer (2020), both co-written with Thomas A. Prendergast. She is currently working on a cultural history of the face in literature, with Joe Hughes, Tyne Sumner, and Guillemette Bolens; and a study of Melbourne’s relationship with bluestone.