The Vera Wright Trilogy: My Father’s Moon, Cabin Fever, The Georges’ Wife

By Elizabeth Jolley
Persea, $19.95, 552 pages

The lauded masterpiece of one of Australia’s most acclaimed authors, Elizabeth Jolley’s The Vera Wright Trilogy is shockingly little known here. The first two books are out of print and the third was never released.  Persea Books has ridden to the rescue, reissuing the trilogy in one magnificent volume.  Loosely based on Jolley’s own experiences, Vera’s story begins in 1939 England, as she leaves school at seventeen to become a nurse in a military hospital. 

“She said, that time in the morning before I went for my day off to sleep among the spindles of rosemary at the end of my mother’s garden, that love was infinite.  That it was possible, if a person loved, to believe in the spiritual understanding of truths which were not fully understood intellectually.  She said that the person you loved was not an end in itself, was not something you came to the end of, but was the beginning of discoveries which could be made because of loving someone.”

Told in the present tense over several decades, Vera recounts her story not in a neat, tight narrative but as a series of overlapping memories marked by yearning obsessions: with sophistication, with marriage, with foods restricted during wartime, and above all with charismatic personalities, the most intense of which culminates in her first child born out of wedlock.  Vera is a remarkable protagonist, a quiet rebel involved in a continuous struggle with societal and familial expectations.  Her decisions less wise than provoked by a desire to find a life that satisfies her.  Jolley melds restraint and passion in writing that can simply be described as musical.  Jolley deserves to be counted among the great voices of the past century, and her trilogy deserves to be read, discussed, and adored.  

Reviewed by Ariel Berg