AROUND THE WORLD IN BOOKS / AUSTRALIA
The Book Hilary Mantel Gives ‘To Cheer People Up’
Three smart young saleswomen in Sydney try to cope when people ‘expect girls to be stupid or at least silly’
This is the first of 30 reviews of 30 books from 30 countries that will appear on this page daily during the first 30 days of March, all in alphabetical order of the country names. Tomorrow: Brazil.
Successful first novels by authors over the age 50 are rare. Successful first novels by women over 50 are even rarer. And successful first novels by women over 50 who haven’t made their name elsewhere almost don’t exist.
Madeleine St. John beat the odds. She had settled in England in 1968, hoping for a fresh start after a privileged but tortured childhood in Sydney and a brief, failed marriage to an aspiring filmmaker. For a quarter century she scraped by in London, emotionally hobbled by the memory of her mother’s suicide and by the steely will of her father, a Liberal MP in Australia.
When she was 51, the ground shifted. Her first novel, The Women in Black, was published by the eminent firm of Andre Deutsch, the British publisher of John Updike, Philip Roth, and V.S. Naipaul. The acerbic critic Clive James called the book a comic masterpiece. The…
