'A guide to the world of Amanda Lohrey's fiction, and a meditation on what her writing has to say about contemporary life and how we live it.
'Amanda Lohrey is a fearless and idiosyncratic writer whose award-winning career spans four decades. Her work is experimental, political, intimate and compelling. Lohrey provides an illuminating series of readings of key preoccupations across Lohrey's body of work. From the relationship of the personal to the political, masculinity and free will, human and non-human worlds and how reading shapes us, Lohrey traces a remarkable career across the contemporary literary landscape, and provides readers with an understanding of Lohrey's bold and singular style.' (Publication summary)
(Introduction)
'Amanda Lohrey’s seventh novel, The Labyrinth, won the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award and is well regarded by readers and critics alike. Julieanne Lamond’s 2022 Lohrey alerts us to the longevity of Lohrey’s career and how her “newfound” popularity has been a long time coming. Lamond’s Lohrey is part of Miegunyah’s Contemporary Australian Writers series. The book is set out thematically and mainly discusses Lohrey’s seven novels, The Morality of Gentlemen (1984), The Reading Group (1988), Camille’s Bread (1995), The Philosopher’s Doll (2004), Vertigo: A Pastoral (2009), A Short History of Richard Kline (2015) and The Labyrinth (2020), but she also touches on Lohrey’s collection of short stories: Reading Madame Bovary (2010). Lamond reflects on Lohrey’s 40-year career as an author and finds the diversity of Lohrey’s writing has enabled her to remain relevant but at the same time has made her difficult to market and promote: “Hers is a deeply independent approach to fiction, often out of step with prevailing trends” (24).' (Introduction)
(Introduction)
'From her first novel, The Morality of Gentlemen (1984), Amanda Lohrey represented a unique, intriguing, and necessary voice in Australian literature. As Julieanne Lamond’s study Lohrey traces, she was both part of but distinct from the 1980s boom in Australian women’s writing and has gone on to produce a diverse oeuvre of novels, short stories, journalism, and nonfiction that captures late twentieth and early twenty-first century Australian life – texts that ‘chronicle the forces that shape intimate and social experience in the contemporary world’ (Lamond 1). Surprisingly, Lohrey’s work has received comparatively scant critical attention, with much of it focused on the controversial pulping of The Reading Group in 1989, making this first monograph on Lohrey a welcome and much needed addition to Australian literary studies and studies of contemporary women writers.' (Introduction)
'The Labyrinth begins with a woman walking through her childhood home – a decommissioned asylum. In middle age she moves to a run-down house by a wild and dangerous sea, where she notes her vivid and prophetic dreams. The house is convenient because she needs to be close to her son, an imprisoned artist. She befriends a stonemason who offers to carve her a gargoyle (which she refuses). Together they design and build her version of a labyrinth, a prayer or meditation path most famously realised in the great medieval cathedral of Chartres, although Lohrey’s antipodean labyrinth is not a homage to the Chartres labyrinth, or an imitation.' (Introduction)
'The Labyrinth begins with a woman walking through her childhood home – a decommissioned asylum. In middle age she moves to a run-down house by a wild and dangerous sea, where she notes her vivid and prophetic dreams. The house is convenient because she needs to be close to her son, an imprisoned artist. She befriends a stonemason who offers to carve her a gargoyle (which she refuses). Together they design and build her version of a labyrinth, a prayer or meditation path most famously realised in the great medieval cathedral of Chartres, although Lohrey’s antipodean labyrinth is not a homage to the Chartres labyrinth, or an imitation.' (Introduction)
'From her first novel, The Morality of Gentlemen (1984), Amanda Lohrey represented a unique, intriguing, and necessary voice in Australian literature. As Julieanne Lamond’s study Lohrey traces, she was both part of but distinct from the 1980s boom in Australian women’s writing and has gone on to produce a diverse oeuvre of novels, short stories, journalism, and nonfiction that captures late twentieth and early twenty-first century Australian life – texts that ‘chronicle the forces that shape intimate and social experience in the contemporary world’ (Lamond 1). Surprisingly, Lohrey’s work has received comparatively scant critical attention, with much of it focused on the controversial pulping of The Reading Group in 1989, making this first monograph on Lohrey a welcome and much needed addition to Australian literary studies and studies of contemporary women writers.' (Introduction)
(Introduction)
'Amanda Lohrey’s seventh novel, The Labyrinth, won the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award and is well regarded by readers and critics alike. Julieanne Lamond’s 2022 Lohrey alerts us to the longevity of Lohrey’s career and how her “newfound” popularity has been a long time coming. Lamond’s Lohrey is part of Miegunyah’s Contemporary Australian Writers series. The book is set out thematically and mainly discusses Lohrey’s seven novels, The Morality of Gentlemen (1984), The Reading Group (1988), Camille’s Bread (1995), The Philosopher’s Doll (2004), Vertigo: A Pastoral (2009), A Short History of Richard Kline (2015) and The Labyrinth (2020), but she also touches on Lohrey’s collection of short stories: Reading Madame Bovary (2010). Lamond reflects on Lohrey’s 40-year career as an author and finds the diversity of Lohrey’s writing has enabled her to remain relevant but at the same time has made her difficult to market and promote: “Hers is a deeply independent approach to fiction, often out of step with prevailing trends” (24).' (Introduction)
