Old favourite dies

Elizabeth Jolley escaped mortality on February 13, but fittingly, rumours of her death were greatly understated.

For years, Jolley 'would write down her observations on scraps of paper and bury them in drawers', cobbling them into short stories and novels that started getting published when she was 53.

Asked whether she was concerned about the recognition gap, she noted:

I was writing for many years before my work was acceptable because I was writing about things that were not acceptable in Australia, in literature.

And things have changed a lot. The climate of acceptance has changed a lot, and that has been very fortunate for me.

Jolley impressed and delighted me, occasionally annoyed me, contributed to keeping me alive during some seriously bleak times. I read a lot of her stories aloud, to friends, or to myself. In my favourite tale, a typically droll and canny Jolley character takes out a lease on some rural land on the condition that she can plant one crop and see it through to harvest. She plants Jarrah.