Elizabeth Jolley (photograph by Tanya Young)Elizabeth Jolley AO (4 June 1923–13 February 2007) was an English-born writer who moved to Western Australia in 1959 with her husband Leonard Jolley and their three children. She was fifty-three when her first book, Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories (1976), was published, and she went on to publish fifteen novels (including an autobiographical trilogy), four short story collections and three non-fiction books. She won The Age Book of the Year Award three times (for Mr Scobie's Riddle (1983), My Father's Moon (1989)and The Georges' Wife(1993)) and she won the Miles Franklin Award for The Well (1986). She was recognised in Australia with an AO for services to literature and was awarded Honorary Doctorates from Curtin University (1986); Macquarie (1995), Queensland (1997) and The University of New South Wales (2000).

Reading Australia

Delys Bird wrote about Miss Peabody's Inheritance (1980) as part of Copyright Agency's Reading Australia project. Click here to read her essay.

Further reading and Links

 Reading Australia teaching resources: Miss Peabody's Inheritance (1980)

Francesca Rendle-Short's review of The House of Fiction by Susan Swingler published in the May 2012 issue of ABR.

'The Jolley Deception' by Susan Wyndham, published in The Age 28 April 2012

'Fiction and lies: what we learn from Elizabeth Jolley’s love letters' by Elizabeth Webby, published in The Conversation 29 October 2013