The Fun of the Fair single work   short story  
Issue Details: First known date: 2015... 2015 The Fun of the Fair
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    y separately published work icon A Few Days in the Country : And Other Stories Elizabeth Harrower , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2015 8702143 2015 selected work short story

    'One day, Alice said, ‘Eric Lane wants to take me to—’

    'For the first time, her mother attended, standing still.

    'Eric was brought to the house, and Eric and Alice were married before there was time to say ‘knife’. How did it happen? She tried to trace it back. She was watching her mother performing for Eric, and then (she always paused here in her mind), somehow, she woke up married and in another house.

    'Internationally acclaimed for her five brilliant novels, Elizabeth Harrower is also the author of a small body of short fiction. A Few Days in the Country brings together for the first time her stories published in Australian journals in the 1960s and 1970s, along with those from her archives—including ‘Alice’, published for the first time earlier this year in the New Yorker.

    'Essential reading for Harrower fans, these finely turned pieces show a broader range than the novels, ranging from caustic satires to gentler explorations of friendship.' (Publication summary)

         Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2015     pg. 1-14
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Related Works

The Fun of the Fair Elizabeth Harrower , 2015 extract short story
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 17-18 October 2015; (p. 16)
VIEW ALL RELATED WORKS (1)

Works about this Work

'Not Crying Now, but Brilliant-Eyed' : Epiphany in Harrower's 'The Fun of the Fair' Emily Maguire , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Reading Like an Australian Writer 2021;
Weather and Temperature, the Will to Power, and the Female Subject in Harrower's Fiction Kate Livett , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Elizabeth Harrower : Critical Essays 2017; (p. 71-85)

'The opening sentence of the first short story Elizabeth Harrower ever completed 3 plunges the reader into a dramatic meteorological event:

And then, as if the lightning that ripped the sky apart wasn’t enough, the lights round the edge of the swimming pool, and even the three big ones sunk into it on cement piles, went out. At once the solid blackness rang with shrieks and laughter; only Janet was struck dumb to find that she had been obliterated. It was like nothing so much as that astronomical darkness into which she had been plunged last year when they took out her tonsils. (Introduction)
Weather and Temperature, the Will to Power, and the Female Subject in Harrower's Fiction Kate Livett , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Elizabeth Harrower : Critical Essays 2017; (p. 71-85)

'The opening sentence of the first short story Elizabeth Harrower ever completed 3 plunges the reader into a dramatic meteorological event:

And then, as if the lightning that ripped the sky apart wasn’t enough, the lights round the edge of the swimming pool, and even the three big ones sunk into it on cement piles, went out. At once the solid blackness rang with shrieks and laughter; only Janet was struck dumb to find that she had been obliterated. It was like nothing so much as that astronomical darkness into which she had been plunged last year when they took out her tonsils. (Introduction)
'Not Crying Now, but Brilliant-Eyed' : Epiphany in Harrower's 'The Fun of the Fair' Emily Maguire , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Reading Like an Australian Writer 2021;
VIEW ALL WORKS ABOUT (2)
Last amended 9 Dec 2015 13:54:14
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