Madeleine: A Life of Madeleine St John by Helen Trinca

In 2012, Text Publishing released its Classics series, the aim of which was to shine a spotlight on some of our nation’s literary milestones, many of which had grown dusty in our archives, either due to institutional neglect or a frustrating public apathy towards Australian writing. Included in the series was Madeleine St John’s most successful novel, The Women in Black. Now, Text is releasing a new biography of St John, who passed away in 2006, by distinguished journalist Helen Trinca.

Funnily enough, St John was hardly the poster girl for Australian writing. Her deep ambivalence towards the country of her upbringing and her bold defection to England as a young woman fed the kind of cultural cringe that dogged Australian art throughout the twentieth century.

This biography doesn’t suffer any such inferiority complexes: it is expertly researched and fair in its portrayal. St John isn’t cast in an overly positive or negative light. Instead we are presented with a long-troubled writer whose volcanic moods drew people to her as much as pushed them away. Trinca’s prose is deliberately plain but still able to masterfully conjure the affluence of 1950s Sydney, its lonely housewives and lost migrants, as well as the shabby chic of 60s London and its bohemian share houses, heady with casual sex and marijuana.

St John was the first Australian woman to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize but her name has faded from public consciousness. Given the fact that St John wrote what Trinca labels ‘upmarket chick-lit with attitude’, it’s anybody’s guess why she isn’t as canonised as her male contemporaries Clive James and Bruce Beresford. The establishment of women’s initiatives like the Stella Prize and the Australian Women Writers Challenge, and indeed the Text Classics series, should hopefully begin to redress this imbalance so that a new breed of readers can acquaint themselves with the gifted and enigmatic woman in black.


Emily Laidlaw is a freelance writer.