Elizabeth Jolley

Elizabeth Jolley
Professor Elizabeth Jolley
Born	Monica Elizabeth Knight (1923-07-04)4 July 1923 Birmingham, England
Died	13 February 2007(2007-02-13) (aged 83) Perth, Western Australia
Occupation	Novelist, professor of creative writing
Spouse(s)	Leonard Jolley
Children	Richard, Ruth, Sarah

Monica Elizabeth Jolley AO (4 June 1923 – 13 February 2007) was an English-born writer who settled in Western Australia in the late 1950s. She was 53 when her first book was published, and she went on to publish fifteen novels (including an autobiographical trilogy), four short story collections and three non-fiction books, publishing well into her 70s and achieving significant critical acclaim. She was also a pioneer of creative writing teaching in Australia, counting many well-known writers such as Tim Winton among her students at Curtin University.

Her novels explore "alienated characters and the nature of loneliness and entrapment."

Jolley was born in Birmingham, England as Monica Elizabeth Knight, to an English father and Austrian-born mother who was the daughter of a high ranking Railways official. She grew up in the Black Country in the English industrial Midlands. She was educated privately until age 11, when she was sent to Sibford School, a Quaker boarding school near Banbury in Oxfordshire which she attended from 1934 to 1940.

At 17 she began training as an orthopaedic nurse in London and later in Surrey. She began an affair with one of her patients, Leonard Jolley (1914–1994), and subsequently became pregnant. Leonard Jolley was already married to Joyce Jolley, who was also pregnant. Elizabeth moved in with the Jolleys, and her daughter Sarah was born five weeks before the birth of Susan Jolley, the child of Leonard and Joyce.

Elizabeth and Leonard subsequently emigrated to Australia in 1959 after they had secretly married. They eventually had three children and Leonard was appointed chief librarian at the Reid Library at the University of Western Australia, a job he held from 1960–1979. Leonard told his family in England that it was Joyce and Susan with whom he had moved to Australia. For several years, Elizabeth wrote letters purportedly from Joyce and Susan to Leonard's British relatives. Leonard eventually asked his former wife to tell their daughter Susan that he had died.