The Women In Black
By Madeleine St John
$35, Text Publishing

Reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

Some books sneak up on you and take you by surprise and The Women in Black is one of them. It’s as light as a Pavlova and just as sweetly delicious.

On one level it’s a simple story about a group of women who work in the Ladies’ Frocks Department of a smart Sydney department store during the 1950s. There’s Patty Williams who’s desperate for a child and unhappy in her marriage; Fay Baines who’s tired of being a single girl; Lisa the temp, fresh out of school and full of hopes and dreams; and the glamorous continental Magda from the Model Gowns department.
With the most economical of writing styles and an Austen-esque eye for social detail Madeleine St John tells of normal days in ordinary lives and so creates a picture of Australian life at a point when it was becoming fused with European culture, a time of change and new beginnings.
The women in this book feel very real, they serve a backyard Christmas lunch on a ping-pong table covered in an old sheet; they gossip, shop and fall in love. The men, however, are mostly drawn in darker colours and portrayed as rather inferior by the possibly quite misandrist author.

The story behind this lost Australian classic is as poignant and fascinating as the book itself. The late Madeleine St John was an Aussie expat who led a semi-reclusive life in London where The Women in Black was first published in the early 90s. Years later a copy was found in a second-hand bookshop and taken along to a book club. One of the members, who happened to be a book editor, fell in love with it and decided it was well worth bringing it out in this part of the world for the first time.
The book includes an Introduction and an Obituary from people who knew St John and she’s painted as a rather waspish, eccentric character. But clearly she also had great warmth and wit, as well as compassion, insight and a talent for under-stated, elegant writing.
This tender comedy of manners has a childlike, fairytale quality and a uniquely Australian flavour. A lovely read that has been shrewdly timed to hit the shelves pre-Mother’s Day.

Footnote:

Nicky Pellegrino is the books editor at the Herald on Sunday where her review of The Women in Black was first published (12 April 2009). She is also a well respected NZ-based novelist whose latest book, The Italian Wedding, (Orion), was publisshed this month and which Bookman Beattie is reviewing this Thursday on Radio NZ National.

Further footnote:

The Bookman was greatly intrigued by Nicky's reference to the publishing history of The Women in Black and a lttle web research produced the following very intetesting obituary from The Independent.

Madeleine St John
Booker short-listed novelist
The Independent, Thursday, 6 July 2006

Madeleine St John, writer: born Sydney, New South Wales 12 November 1941; married 1965 Christopher Tillam (marriage dissolved 1972); died London 18 June 2006.
Madeleine St John wrote four novels in her short writing life. She was 52 when the first, The Women in Black, was published in 1993. The other three followed soon after, and form a loose trilogy set in contemporary London; Notting Hill, where she lived most of her adult life, particularly favoured. The Essence of the Thing (1997) was short-listed for the Booker Prize. She also left behind an unfinished manuscript.

Language and a questioning faith are the two poles of St John's created world, as may also have been true of her domestic world. In a last letter, to her beloved vicar, Father Alex Hill, she wrote: "If I have managed to be a Christian at all, it is due to the marvellous Book of Common Prayer." Beneath the sly and witty veneer of her writing, she explores questions that are basically theological: we must do the right thing, but how can we tell what the right thing is? This question is at the heart of all of her novels.

In 2002 Madeleine St John prepared strict funeral instructions. She was very ill for at least the last decade of her life. Emphysema made her a virtual recluse, though her illness did not stop her smoking. Her tin of Golden Virginia was often to be seen next to her inhaler, and later, her oxygen supply. Her reclusiveness was furthered by the fact that she lived, for the last 20 years of her life, on the top floor of a house owned by the Notting Hill Housing Trust. She called herself a housing trustafarian.
She claimed to be a de facto recluse for lack of money - not that St John ever complained of her lot - but her isolation was not entirely outside her control. St John could be very entertaining company, but she had a habit of casting anyone who got too close into outer darkness, usually for reasons entirely opaque to the one cast out. She could just as easily reel friends back in, and for similarly mysterious reasons. She lived by a strict moral code, the rules of which were only truly clear to herself.
This week, the strict funeral instructions were ingeniously and subversively carried out by Fr Alex. Though no reference was to be made to her life, Fr Alex managed to circumvent this by speaking of her before the service began, a sly and witty ploy that Madeleine would surely have appreciated.
The control and desire for anonymity were typical St John qualities. At her death, her always Spartan flat was found to have been even further denuded. An obviously brand-new address book contained the telephone numbers of only a handful of people.

Read the full and interesting obituary online here.

And if you are still interested then here is the briefer obit from the SMH.