'A prolific writer, Thea Astley published 16 works of fiction during her lifetime, 4 of which won the Miles Franklin Award. Susan Sheridan notes that Astley was ‘the only woman among the leading modernist novelists of the postwar period’ and the only woman who ‘published consistently throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when the literary world was heavily male dominated’. Astley received praise from Vance Palmer and Frank Dalby Davison at the start of her career, as well as a somewhat patronising nod in 1960 from friend and early mentor Patrick White: ‘She has wit and flashes of intelligence for a Brisbane girl turned schoolteacher’. Yet even in 1965 after Astley had published 4 novels and won 2 Miles Franklin Awards, Clem Christesen considered her work ‘not yet substantial enough’ to warrant an essay and that she was still to write ‘a really significant novel’. Influenced by innovative American short-form writers such as William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Ernest Hemingway, Astley’s work received American attention and she undertook a number of residencies in the United States. ' (Introduction)
