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“... own proper limits, and the resilience of Pat Barker’s writing lies in knowing where they lie. Elizabeth Jolley has always dealt shrewdly with the risks and pleasures of fantasy. In The Sugar Mother, she too turns to the familial complications a man might dream up for himself. Edwin Page is an academic, plugging away at English literature in an ...”

“... until this century when it began to be rejected as a usurpation of the God’s-eye view. Elizabeth Jolley, for instance, is quite capable of telling a story but seems to feel that she ought not to. Miss Peabody’s Inheritance is primarily about a headmistress with lesbian tendencies and her affairs with pupils and fellow teachers: but the story ...”

“... of industrial archaeology, a father/daughter relationship and eroticism powerfully combine. With Elizabeth Jolley’s Stories, it’s probably best to begin with the last piece in the book, a self-styled self-portrait (‘A child went forth’) which in a few pages deftly, and with a puzzled naivety which I don’t think is false, sketches in her ...”

“... out still. Such stories here – and there are good ones by slightly older writers, such as Elizabeth Jolley, Olga Masters, Judah Waten – bring out something important in the nature of the form. It can carry an immense charge of social implication provided this remains immanent and tacit, visible only in the perspective and depth. Any attempt to ...”

“... own polite loathing of her grand yet self-absorbed mother. In the mordantly sapphic novels of Elizabeth Bowen, older women are depicted as seductive and treacherous – enchanting sociopaths who leave the younger women who fall in love with them both shell-shocked and vengeful. (See in particular Bowen’s brilliant first novel, The Hotel, of 1927.) In ...”