Eve Langley

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Eve Maria Langley ( September 1, 1904 , † June 1974 ), real name Ethel Jane Langley , was an Australian writer. Her novels belong to that line of tradition of Australian women writers who deal with the conflicts of women artists in society. None of her works have been translated into German. In particular, " The Pea Pickers " is constantly reprinted in Australia.

Life

Langley was born in Forbes, New South Wales , the eldest daughter of a seasonal worker. Her parents were Arthur Alexander Langley († 1915) and his wife Myra, née Davidson, both of whom came from the Australian state of Victoria . Eve Langley's mother was disinherited as a result of this unwanted marriage, and the family lived in poverty most of the time. After Arthur Langley died, Myra Langley went back to Victoria , where she ran her brother's hotel in Crossover , about 50 km east of Melbourne . Eve Langley and her sister June attended various schools such as Brunswick Central, Dandenong State School, and Dandenong High School .

In the 1920s, she and her sister worked as seasonal farm laborers in Gippsland , in southeastern Victoria . Both dressed in masculine style. She used this experience as the basis for her first novel, The Pea Pickers . In 1932 she followed her mother and sister to New Zealand , where she met the 22-year-old art student Hilary Clark in 1937 , whom she later married when she was pregnant. They had three children, a daughter and two sons. In 1942, her husband sent her to a mental institution. The children came to the orphanage when Clark was called up. She was released from the sanatorium in 1949. Her sister took care of her. The marriage ended in divorce in 1952.

Langley worked as a bookbinder in Auckland from 1950 to 1955 and visited Australia in 1956 and 1957 . She traveled extensively on the Australian east coast. She traveled to Great Britain from 1959 to 1960 and came back to New South Wales at the end of that trip . She then lived in New South Wales until her death with the exception of one trip to Greece .

Suzanne Falkiner wrote of women reporting on the wilderness in Australia that “the few women who consciously ventured into the wild alone without chasing after their protective husbands - from Daisy Bates in the 1880s to Eve Langley in the 1930s and Robyn Davidson in the 1970s - often struggling against being seen as eccentric or even crazy ”.

In her later years she lived very secluded in a cabin outside Katoomba in the Blue Mountains , some 60 km west of Sydney . She became more eccentric, used men's clothing, a white pith helmet and always carried a knife in her belt. Dale Spender wrote that much has been written about her eccentricity, such as wearing pants, and then went on, "It is shocking that sometimes more comments have been written about her eccentricity as a person than about the strengths of her literary production." Langley referred to Oscar Wilde as her alter ego. It went so far as to officially adopt this name in 1954. Her work contains many references to her enigmatic life.

Hal Porter wrote in 1965 about writers he had met and in this context said "... among all these, Eve Langley is the one with whom I spent the most colorful day on the first day we met, cheered up by the unexpected."

She lived alone in a cabin in the Blue Mountains for the last few years of her life . She probably died there between June 1 and 13, 1974. The body was only discovered about three weeks after her death.

Development as a writer

Langley first made a name for herself as a writer in New Zealand in the 1930s. Her poems appeared regularly in magazines such as those of Douglas Stewart , Gloria Rawlinson, and Robyn Hyde . McLeod wrote that she "... made a name for herself in New Zealand's literary circles as a promising poet in the late 1930s." Her poems continued to be published after her return to Australia, for example in The Bulletin . One of her poems, " Native-born ", appears regularly in Australian anthologies. Her journalistic work and short stories appeared regularly in the 1930s and 1940s, more sporadically in the 1950s.

Although Langley wrote throughout her lifetime, only two novels were published during her lifetime. The manuscripts of ten other novels are kept in the Mitchell Library . She wrote a lot in the 1920s, including diaries, letters, poems, and short stories. Some of this was used in her semi-autobiographical novel The Pea-Pickers , published in 1942. The Pea-Pickers has been described as an “imaginative, autobiographical, first-person narrator story about the adventures of two young women - ' Steve ' and ' Blue ' - who are in search of exciting experiences, love and 'poetry' in rural Gippsland are. ”Contrary to the lightness of the picaresque narrative tone of“ The Pea Pickers ”, Eve Langley was living with her children in dire poverty in an Auckland slum at the time this novel was written . Langley often uses the name ' Steve ' for her person in her diaries .

Style and themes

In an interview in 1964, Langley described her writing process as "embroidery in literature" and "saw herself as someone who is constantly chatting and embroidering fairy tales with great imagination". McLeod described her as "a subtle, ironic, and complex novelist", adding that her best expression is "sometimes lyrical, sometimes cynical, with a great descriptive flair and a good instinct for dialogue."

Makowiecka suggests dividing Langley's novels - both the published and the unpublished - into two groups. The first group - The Pea-Pickers , White Topee , Wild Australia , The Victorians and Bancroft House - “recalls their life in Gippsland and mixes this narrative with that of Bushmen and women from the 1880s and continues to decorate it with poetry, small pieces, lyrics and hymn songs to the gods and mystical lands ”. The second group - all unpublished - concerns their departure to and life in New Zealand. In them she mixes her stories again, but "now with obviously contemporary and factual diary entries, intertwined with a patchwork of poetry, fantasy and multifaceted subjectivity that blurs the literary genres."

Makiowiecka also points out that time, memory and the land recur regularly in her literary works. She writes about time both from a historical perspective and as a personal and everyday experience. She probes the memory process and what is remembered and how this enters the world of thought. She calls the land "the sacred earth of antiquity and writes about an equally mystical Australia." She says she found "a new piece of consciousness in every new piece of landscape I saw." In other words, as she travels and writes she invents herself in a landscape she has invented. In her writing, memory and landscape are intertwined in such a way that they influence each other.

Publication of the manuscripts left behind

Various attempts have been made over the years to get the ten unpublished novels out. McLeod describes how she and her colleague Anita Segerburg edited the unpublished novels from the time in Auckland for publication in 1993 and 1994 . However, because of the lack of consent from Langley’s daughter Bisi, they could not appear.

Lucy Frost's Wilde Eve , a further adaptation of the New Zealand time novels, came out in 1999. In her introduction to the book, Frost writes: “She was Eve Langley and Oscar Wilde , Australian woman and English man - a poet who got into the troubles of World War II. Immortal, an ancient poet reborn. ”Aside from this quote, the obsession with Wilde plays only a minor role. The narrator's alter ego is Steve , not Oscar Wilde .

Langley portrayed in other media

Mark O'Flynn's play, titled Eleanor and Eve, speculates what might have happened if Australian writers Eve Langley and Eleanor Dark met. Although they both lived in the Katoomba area at the same time - Dark from 1934 and Langley from the 1960s until her death in 1974, there is no evidence that they ever met. The play premiered in 2002 in Varuna, Eleanor Dark’s home, which is now a center for writers. The audience walked from room to room with the actors as the play was played. In 2003 it was performed in a more traditional form and setting at the Railway St. Theater in Penrith City , New South Wales .

Australian-born, now Canada-based dancer Elizabeth Langley developed a one-hour multimedia presentation for dance theater about Eve Langley entitled Journal of Pedal Dreams . It illuminates Langley's struggle with conflicting interests as a mother, wife, and creative muse. The play was performed in Australia and Canada in 2003 and 2004. It contains some spoken sentences and includes projections of Langley's poems and diary entries. It is based on research by Elizabeth Langley and the Australian Paul Rainsford Towner .

Awards

  • 1940: SH Prior Memorial Prize (awarded by The Bulletin , an Australian weekly magazine), for The Pea-Pickers , along with Kylie Tennant's The Battlers and Malcolm Henry Ellis' John Murtagh Macrossan

bibliography

  • The Pea-Pickers (1942)
  • White Topee (1954)

literature

  • Adelaide, Debra (1988) Australian women writers: a bibliographic guide , London, Pandora
  • Falkiner, Suzanne (1992) Wilderness (The Writers' Landscape), East Roseville, Simon & Schuster
  • McLeod, Aorewa (1999) "Alternative eves", Hecate , October 1999, pp. 164-179
  • Makowiecka, Kate (2002) "'One long tumultuous inky shout': reconsidering Eve Langley", Antipodes , December 1, 2002, pp. 181-182
  • Porter, Hal (1965) "Melbourne in the thirties", London Magazine , 5 (6): 31-47, September 1965
  • Spender, Dale (1988) Writing a New World: Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers , London: Pandora
  • Thwaite, JL (1989) The Importance of Being Eve Langley
  • Wilde, William H., Hooton, Joy and Andrews, Barry (1994) The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature 2nd ed., Melbourne, Oxford University Press

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biography HarperCollins Publishers Australia, Eve Langley: Biography, downloaded March 1, 2010
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Thwaite (2000)
  3. ^ State Library of New South Wales
  4. ↑ “ Those rare women who have deliberately gone into the landscape alone, and not trailing in the tracks of a protective husband - from Daisy Bates in the 1880s to Eve Langley in the 1930s and Robyn Davidson in the 1970s - have often had to combat being considered eccentric, or even mad. “Falkiner (1992) p. 119
  5. ↑ Wilde, et al. (1994)
  6. ↑ " it is distressing to find that sometimes there is more comment about her eccentricities as a person than about the strengths of her writing ". Spender (1988) p. 298
  7. ^ " Of them all, Eve Langley is the one with whom, on a first meeting, I spent the most dazzling day, enlivened by the unforeseen ". Porter (1965) p. 45
  8. ↑ " by the late thirties known in New Zealand literary circles as a promising poet ." McLeod (1999) p. 176
  9. ↑ a b c d Makowiecka (2002) p. 181
  10. ^ " Who seek excitement, love and 'poetry' in rural Gippsland ". Adelaide (1988) p. 113
  11. ↑ See biography, HarperCollins Publishers Australia, Eve Langley: Biography, downloaded March 1, 2010. See also Lucy Frost's introduction to " The Pea Pickers " in the 1991 edition of Angus & Robertson, North Ryde ( Sydney ). ISBN 0-207 -17172-6
  12. ↑ " a subtle, ironic and complex novelist ", in: McLeod (1999) p 170
  13. ↑ " sometimes lyrical, sometimes cynical, with a marvelous descriptive flair and an ear for dialogue ". In: McLeod (1999) p. 173
  14. ↑ Makowiecka (2002) pp. 181-2
  15. ↑ a b c Makowiecka (2002) p. 182
  16. ^ " Picked up a new piece of mind from every piece of different landscape I saw ". Quoting from Langley's Wild Australia by Makowiecka (2002) p. 182
  17. ↑ a b McLeod (1999) p. 166
  18. ↑ quoted in McLeod (1999) p. 166
  19. ↑ see Taffel (2003)
  20. ↑ see Elkins (2004)
  21. ↑ see Studio 303
personal data
SURNAME Langley, Eve
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Langley, Eve Maria; Langley, Ethel Jane (real name); Clark, Eve; Wilde, Oscar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 1, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Forbes, New South Wales, Australia
DATE OF DEATH around June 1, 1974
Place of death Katoomba , New South Wales, Australia