 First edition | |
| Author | Elizabeth Harrower |
|---|---|
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary fiction |
| Publisher | Cassell & Co (1957) Text Publishing (2013) |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 352 pp |
| ISBN | 9781922147042 |
| Followed by | The Long Prospect |
Down in the City is the 1957 debut novel by Australian writer Elizabeth Harrower. [1] It is set in post-war Sydney and centers around the troubled marriage of a sheltered, privileged young woman to a destructive, egotistical male.
Esther Prescott lives a sheltered, privileged life in a stone mansion at Sydney's harbourside Rose Bay. She is the only female member of her high-society family, and has seen little of life outside of her upper-class suburb. She meets the "flashy" self-made man Stan Peterson and the two are hastily married. After their wedding, Esther moves into a Kings Cross apartment with him; although charming in the beginning, he quickly reveals himself to be a tyrannical, egotistical drunk. [2]
Their relationship is further complicated by nosy residents of the building, and the return of Stan's ex-girlfriend, Vivian. Prescott finds herself at somewhat of a crossroads–her passivity and stoic manner are tested when her married life begins to unravel at the hands of her obstreperous, manipulative and immoral husband.
Down in the City deals with class divisions, opportunity, gender, marriage and domestic violence in post-war Sydney. [3]
The novel was first published in London and was well regarded at the time. [4] Harrower had written it in her London flat after a bout of homesicknesses for Australia, particularly Sydney.
Like all of Harrower's other novels, it went out of print in its native Australia for a considerable period before being re-published by Text Publishing, as part of their Classics series, in October 2013. [5] This edition contains an introduction by Delia Falconer.
Writing for The Australian , David Barrett stated that the novel "marked the arrival of one of the sharpest authors of psychological fiction in Australian literature. Many of the things that happen in the novel are unpleasant, but are rendered with such intensity and psychological insight that the experience of reading about them is thrilling. Harrower tells the truth about how it feels to suffer like Esther does, and to do so in a city as beautiful as Sydney". [6] He further stated that despite the novel being about emotional abuse in a damaged marriage, the book was "a pleasure to read", like "beautiful little nightmares".
Tara Judah, writing for Readings in 2013, noted that the novel is "far more biting than the melodramatic premise might suggest", and further commented on the juxtaposition of its Australian and English culture: "the novel feels equally as interested in Englishness as it is in Australianness". [7]
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an English poet of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime and frequently anthologised after her death. Her work received renewed attention following the feminist scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s, and greater recognition of women writers in English.
Rose Bay is an affluent, harbourside, eastern suburb of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Rose Bay is located seven kilometres east of the Sydney central business district, in the local government areas of Municipality of Woollahra and Waverley Council.
Clover Margaret Moore is an Australian politician. She has been the Lord Mayor of the City of Sydney since 2004 and is currently the longest serving Lord Mayor of Sydney since the creation of the City of Sydney in 1842. She was an independent member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly from 1988 to 2012, representing the electorates of Bligh (1988–2007) and Sydney (2007–2012). Her "recurrent motif" is described as "making Sydney more liveable for individuals and families". Moore is the first popularly elected woman Lord Mayor of Sydney.
The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize awarded to "a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases". The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin (1879–1954), who is best known for writing the Australian classic My Brilliant Career (1901). She bequeathed her estate to fund this award. As of 2016, the award is valued at A$60,000.
Mrs. Warren's Profession is a play written by George Bernard Shaw in 1893, and first performed in London in 1902. It is one of the three plays Shaw published as Plays Unpleasant in 1898, alongside The Philanderer and Widowers' Houses. The play is about a former prostitute, now a madam, who attempts to come to terms with her disapproving daughter. It is a problem play, offering social commentary to illustrate the idea that the act of prostitution was not caused by moral failure but by economic necessity. Elements of the play were borrowed from Shaw's 1882 novel Cashel Byron's Profession, about a man who becomes a boxer due to limited employment opportunities.
Elizabeth Harrower was an Australian novelist and short story writer. She has been considered "one of the great novelists of Sydney". Much of her work tackles the theme of domestic abuse, particularly the psychological abuse of vulnerable women at the hands of their manipulative, deceitful and tyrannical male partners.
Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford was an American writer of novels, poems and detective stories. One of the United States's most widely-published authors, her career spanned more than six decades and included many literary genres, such as short stories, poems, novels, literary criticism, biographies, and memoirs. She also wrote articles on household decorative art and travel as well as children's literature.
Seven Little Australians is a classic Australian children's literature novel by Ethel Turner, published in 1894. Set mainly in Sydney in the 1880s, it relates the adventures of the seven mischievous Woolcot children, their stern army father Captain Woolcot, and faithful young stepmother Esther.
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.
Playing Beatie Bow is a popular Australian children's novel, written by Ruth Park and first published on 31 January 1980. It features a time slip in Sydney, Australia.
Memoirs of Modern Philosophers is a novel by British author Elizabeth Hamilton published in 1800. Responding to the Revolution Controversy of the 1790s and the debates about what roles women should occupy in English society, the novel contends that a poor education limits women's opportunities while at the same time arguing they should limit their activities to the domestic sphere. It occupies a middle ground between the liberal arguments of novelists such as Mary Hays and the conservative arguments by writers such as Hannah More.
Jonas Alfred Lipman, frequently referred to as "Joe", was an Australian philanthropist, actor, producer and director of theatre and film. He was described as "a colourful extrovert" with "a flair for the wheeling and dealing of the film trade".
Samuel Moss Solomon was an early Jewish settler in Australia, amongst whose descendants many achieved a degree of notability. The relationship between these descendants is complicated by three factors: the duplication of names, not only within a family line but across lines; the number of intra-family marriages; and marriages to people with the same surname but not closely related. This list is not exhaustive but includes most family members likely to be found in Wikipedia and Australian newspapers.
Hannah Kent is an Australian writer, known for two novels – Burial Rites (2013) and The Good People (2016). Her third novel, Devotion, was published in 2021.
In Certain Circles is an Australian novel by Elizabeth Harrower. Though the novel was written sometime in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was not published until 2014 when it became her first novel published in 48 years. It helped to spur a revival of interest in her body of work.
This article presents a list of the historical events and publications of Australian literature during 1957.
The Watch Tower (1966) is a novel by Australian author Elizabeth Harrower.
The River Ophelia is an Australian novel by Justine Ettler first published by Picador in 1995. The story moves between first-person narrative to an unnamed observer. It was highly controversial in Australia upon its publication, with some prominent critics dismissing it as pornographic, though Ettler herself has strongly denied this.
Nightmare Alley is a 2021 neo-noir psychological thriller film co-written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, and based on the 1946 novel of the same name by William Lindsay Gresham. It is the second feature film adaptation of Gresham's novel, following the 1947 version. A co-production between Searchlight Pictures, TSG Entertainment, and Double Dare You Productions, the film stars Bradley Cooper as a charming and ambitious carnival worker with a mysterious past who takes big risks to boost his career. Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, Ron Perlman, Mary Steenburgen, and David Strathairn also star.
Jennifer Down is an Australian novelist and short story writer. She won the 2022 Miles Franklin Award for her novel Bodies of Light.