I for Isobel: Text Classics
Text Classics
Amy Witting
Introduction by Charlotte Wood
This was life: no sooner had you built yourself your little raft and felt secure than it came to pieces under you and you were swimming again.
Born into a world without welcome, Isobel observes it as warily as an alien trying to pass for a native. Her collection of imaginary friends includes the Virgin Mary and Sherlock Holmes. Later she meets Byron, W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot. Isobel is not so much at ease with the flesh-and-blood people she meets, and least of all with herself, until a lucky encounter and a little detective work reveal her identity and her true situation in life.
I for Isobel, a modern-day Australian classic, was followed by Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop, winner of the Age Book of the Year Award.
andI for Isobel
‘When we come to write the history of Australian writing in the twentieth century, the strange case of Amy Witting will be there to haunt us. Here is a writer who not only has great gifts—the kind of expert and mimetic gifts that would impel instant recognition from someone who admired a fine-lined American naturalist like William Maxwell—but a realist who has an effortless immediacy and a compelling sense of drama that should have ensured the widest kind of appeal, the sort of appeal that Helen Garner could command in her fiction-writing days. And yet this woman who published in the New Yorker and commanded the respect of Kenneth Slessor was scarcely encouraged during the long grey sleep of Australian fiction publishing. It wasn’t until the publication of I for Isobel…that Witting gained a national profile.'
‘Australia’s Amy Witting is comparable to Jean Rhys, but she has more starch, or vinegar. The effect is bracing.'
‘Isobel is instinctively searching for a lost part of her substance, the very memory of which has been obliterated. Prompted by her inexplicable sense of loss, she goes on her way, deviating, baffled, yet rejecting substitutes. To call the ending happy is to say both too much and too little. Was the lost part also searching for her? Amy Witting’s admirers will find this novel as distinctive and compelling as her stories and her poetry.’
‘[Witting] lays bare with surgical precision the dynamics of families, sibling, students in coffee shops, office coteries. One sometimes feels positively winded with unsettling insights. There is something relentless, almost unnerving in her anatomising of foibles, fears obsessions, private shame, the nature of loneliness, the nature of panic.'
‘A beautifully but unobtrusively honed style, a marvellous ear for dialogue, a generous understanding of the complex waywardness of men and women.’
‘Sparkling prose and extraordinary ability to enter the minds of a wide variety of characters.'
‘Terrific—incredibly wise…When I finished it I went straight back to the first page.’
