Among the clever young Australians who came over here in the 1960s to find themselves and make their mark, a number, as we all know, never went back. A few became household names — Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, Clive James — and British cultural life owes them a great deal.
Madeleine St John, the novelist and semi-reclusive eccentric who smoked herself to an early death in London in 2006, was one of them; but although eventually she made a minor literary reputation for herself, writing four novels in her middle age of which the third, The Essence of the Thing, made the Booker shortlist in 1997, she has remained largely unknown here.
Now a respected Australian journalist, Helen Trinca, has written Madeleine St John’s biography, published by the Melbourne-based literary publishers. Text, who make it their business to promote underrated Australian writers. Ironically, she greatly disliked being identified as Australian, and only one of her novels, the first and most brilliant, The Women in Black, is set there. ‘I was brought up on the idea that England was where I came from, in a deep sense where I belonged,’ she once remarked. ‘Australia was a deviation of one’s essence’.
Madeleine’s story, clearly and sympathetically told, is one of fractured identity, emotional disaster and a wonderful late-flowering talent against many odds. She was the child of two very different kinds of Australian; her father, Edward St John, was the well-connected descendant of English churchmen and intellectuals, a lawyer who became a leading QC and a Liberal (i.e. conservative) MP, who nevertheless held strong libertarian views.
Her mother, Sylvette, grew up in Paris and considered herself French; she had arrived in Australia in 1934 with her Romanian Jewish parents, in flight from anti-Semitism.
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