Bøker av Elizabeth Jolley

This is the story of an old cleaning woman-known as “Weekly” or “The Newspaper” to the residents of Claremont Street for whom she works-who dreams of escape from the parasitic demands of both her past and her present. This new edition of a contemporary classic reintroduces this very popular and distinctive character.

Edwin Page, a fussy middle-aged professor, no sooner bids farewell to his obstetrician wife, Cecilia, who accepted a fellowship abroad, when his new neighbors, Mrs. Botts and her sexy, twentyish daughter, Leila, arrive. Since they're locked out of their house, Edwin invites them in-and then can't get them to leave. He becomes obsessed with Leila and convinces himself that she is a perfect surrogate mother for the childless Cecilia. "Wickedly amusing . . . subversive" (New York Times Book Review), The Sugar Mother undoes the institution of marriage.

Set in 1940s wartime England, the trilogy follows young Vera, who leaves her cultivated Midlands home to become a nurse in a military hospital and is catapulted into adulthood through unorthodox love entanglements with both men and women, two illegitimate children, and finally emigration to Australia, where, from her new vantage point-now a doctor and writer-she looks back on her life's journey. Combining the beauty of Virginia Woolf with the spare, heartbreaking insightfulness of Jean Rhys, the trilogy is both a literary tour de force and an accessible, universal portrait of a woman in search of sustaining love.The concluding volume, The Georges' Wife, is published here for the first time in the US. The first two volumes have long been out of print. North American readers can now experience "the most ambitious and accomplished work in Jolley's oeuvre" (J. M. Coetzee).