 First edition | |
| Author | Jessica Anderson |
|---|---|
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary fiction |
| Publisher | Macmillan |
Publication date | 1963 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 251pp |
| Preceded by | – |
| Followed by | The Last Man's Head |
An Ordinary Lunacy (1963) is a novel by Australian writer Jessica Anderson.
After being attracted to Isobel Purdy at a party, lawyer David Byfield finds himself defending her in court after she is charged with the murder of her husband. His defense is successful and the relationship between the two begins to blossom. But Isobel is a complicated woman and the relationship also becomes tangled and complicated.
Hope Hewitt in The Canberra Times, commenting on the 1988 re-issue of the novel, noted: "It is set in present-day Sydney; Anderson has an understated talent for evoking Sydney, and it docs not matter for this study of personal relationships, caught at the focus point of an apparent suicide, that 25 years have gone by. Sydney life is evoked subtly, assumed as being within the experience of her intelligent cosmopolitan readers; it is not insistent, but it is important." [1]
The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature described the novel as combining "penetrating observation of a sophisticated segment of Sydney society with exploration of an obsessive passion." [2]
Patrick Victor Martindale White was a British-born Australian writer who published 12 novels, three short-story collections, and eight plays, from 1935 to 1987.
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Jessica Margaret Anderson was an Australian novelist and short story writer. Born in Gayndah, Anderson lived the bulk of her life in Sydney apart from a few years in London. She began her career writing short stories for newspapers and drama scripts for radio, especially adaptations of well-known novels. Embarking on her career as a novelist relatively late in life - her first novel was published when she was 47 - her early novels attracted little attention. She rose to prominence upon the publication of her fourth novel, Tirra Lirra by the River, published in 1978. Although she remains best known for this work, several of her novels have garnered high acclaim, most notably The Impersonators (1980) and Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories (1987), both of which have won awards. She won the Miles Franklin Literary Award twice, and has been published in Britain and the United States. Jessica Anderson died at Elizabeth Bay, New South Wales in 2010, following a stroke. She was the mother of Australian screenwriter Laura Jones, her only child.
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