Sheila Fitzpatrick Sheila Fitzpatrick i(A17350 works by)
Born: Established: 1941 Melbourne, Victoria, ;
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 Writing History/Writing about Yourself : What’s the Difference? Sheila Fitzpatrick , single work criticism

'According to Philippe Lejeune, writers of autobiography implicitly sign a pact with the reader to tell the truth, or at least the truth as they know it, about themselves.2 That is, primarily a subjective truth. As for facts, the expectation is presumably that autobiographers will convey the facts as they know or remember them, but without a necessary obligation to check their memory through documentary or other research. There is no autobiographer’s commitment to objectivity, rather the contrary. The autobiographical truth is, by definition, a subjective one.' (Introduction)

1 Collaborating with Stuart Sheila Fitzpatrick , 2022 single work essay
— Appears in: The Work of History : Writing for Stuart Macintyre 2022;
1 File-Selves Sheila Fitzpatrick , 2022 single work essay
— Appears in: London Review of Books , 22 September vol. 44 no. 18 2022;
1 An Adventurous Nature : A Writer’s Life through Her Own Eyes Sheila Fitzpatrick , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , July no. 444 2022; (p. 13-14)

— Review of The Red Witch : A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard Nathan Hobby , 2022 single work biography

'Katharine Susannah Prichard is one of those mid-century Australian literary figures like Vance Palmer whose name is mentioned in literary histories more often than her books are read. As it happens, she was a schoolfriend of Vance’s future wife, Nettie, née Higgins, who became a distinguished literary critic, as well as of the pioneering woman lawyer Christian Jollie Smith, and Hilda Bull, later married to the playwright Louis Esson. All were politically on the left as adults, and Prichard and Jollie Smith joined the Communist Party. It was the distant Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 that converted Katharine to the communist cause; she was a communist in Western Australia before there was a party there for her to belong to.' (Introduction)   

1 4 y separately published work icon Mischka's War : A European Odyssey of the 1940s Sheila Fitzpatrick , Carlton : Melbourne University Press , 2017 11731889 2017 single work biography

'On a winter's day in 1943, 22-year-old Mischka Danos chanced on a terrible sight as he skied through Latvian woods—a pit filled with the bodies of Jews killed by the occupying Germans. The world was full of such atrocities, which makes Mischka's decision to escape conscription to the Waffen-SS by going on a student exchange to Germany all the more remarkable. Even more so when Mischka later discovered he was part-Jewish.

'But his was no ordinary life. He narrowly escaped death in the Allied fire bombing of Dresden. He then lived the precarious life of a Displaced Person in occupied Germany before heading north with the hope of crossing the border into Denmark, where he finally reunited with his mother Olga. He went on to become a member of the exceptional Heidelberg school of physics. They were both resettled in the US at the beginning of the 1950s, which is where, much later, he met, fell in love with and married Sheila Fitzpatrick.

'Fitzpatrick pieces together her late husband's story through diaries, correspondence and recollections: 'This is a historian's book but it's also a wife's book about her husband ... an offering of love that is also a search for knowledge.'' (Publication summary)

1 Red Rose Sheila Fitzpatrick , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , October no. 375 2015; (p. 62-63)

— Review of Red Professor : The Cold War Life of Fred Rose Peter Monteath , Valerie Munt , 2015 single work biography
1 Dark Rye Sheila Fitzpatrick , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 371 2015; (p. 66)

— Review of Bloodhound : Searching for My Father Ramona Koval , 2015 single work autobiography
1 Woman in Gloves Sheila Fitzpatrick , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , August no. 363 2014; (p. 19)

— Review of In My Mother's Hands Elizabeth Ward , 2014 single work autobiography
1 Demoyte's Grey Suit : Writing Memoirs, Writing History Sheila Fitzpatrick , 2014 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , June-July no. 362 2014; (p. 26-30)
1 Rediscovering Alma : The Violin Prodigy from Mount Morgan Sheila Fitzpatrick , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , February no. 358 2014; (p. 35-36)

— Review of Bluebeard's Bride : Alma Moodie, Violinist Kay Dreyfus , 2013 single work biography
1 In the Moscow Archives Sheila Fitzpatrick , 2013 single work autobiography
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , September no. 354 2013; (p. 33-36)
1 4 y separately published work icon A Spy in the Archives Sheila Fitzpatrick , Melbourne : Melbourne University Press , 2013 6480074 2013 single work autobiography

'In 1968 historian Sheila Fitzpatrick was ‘outed’ by the Russian newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya as all but a spy for Western intelligence. She was in Moscow at the time, working in Soviet archives for her doctoral thesis on AV Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Despite KGB attention, and the impossibility of finding a suitable winter coat, Sheila felt more at ease in Moscow than in Britain—a feeling cemented by her friendships with Lunacharsky's daughter, Irina, and brother-in-law, Igor, a reform-minded old Bolshevik who became a surrogate father and a intellectual mentor. An affair with young Communist activist, Sasha, pulled her further into a world in which she already felt at home. For the Soviet authorities and archives, however, she would always be marked as a foreigner, and so potentially a spy.

Punctuated by letters to her mother in Melbourne and her diary entries of the time, and borne along by Fitzpatrick's wry, insightful narrative, A Spy in the Archives captures the life and times of Cold War Russia. ' (Publisher's blurb)

1 Can You Write a History of Yourself Sheila Fitzpatrick , 2011 single work autobiography
— Appears in: Griffith Review , Spring no. 33 2011;
1 The Historian in the Wings Sheila Fitzpatrick , 2010 extract autobiography (My Father's Daughter : Memories of an Australian Childhood)
— Appears in: The Age , 31 July 2010; (p. 17)
1 14 y separately published work icon My Father's Daughter : Memories of an Australian Childhood Sheila Fitzpatrick , Carlton : Melbourne University Press , 2010 Z1713085 2010 single work autobiography

'How does a daughter tell the story of her father?

Sheila Fitzpatrick was taught from an early age to question authority. She learnt it from her father, the journalist and radical historian Brian Fitzpatrick. But very soon, she began to turn her questioning gaze on him.

Teasing apart the many layers of memory, Fitzpatrick reveals a complex portrait of an Australian family against a Cold War backdrop. As her relationship with her father fades from girlhood adoration to adolescent scepticism, she flees Melbourne for Oxford to start a new life. But it's not so easy to escape being her father's daughter.

My Father's Daughter is a vivid evocation of an Australian childhood; a personal memoir told with the piercing insight of a historian.' (From the publisher's website.)

1 4 y separately published work icon Political Tourists : Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s-1940s Sheila Fitzpatrick (editor), Carolyn Rasmussen (editor), Carlton : Melbourne University Press , 2008 Z1560737 2008 anthology biography
1 4 y separately published work icon Against the Grain : Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark in Australian History and Politics Stuart Macintyre (editor), Sheila Fitzpatrick (editor), Carlton : Melbourne University Press , 2007 Z1442913 2007 anthology criticism biography 'While Brian Fitzpatrick has today [2007] fallen into relative obscurity, efforts persist in discrediting Manning Clark's name. Against the Grain examines the dual careers of Fitzpatrick and Clark as activists and historians during the Cold War, and shows the political and personal difficulties that beset both men throughout their careers.' (Publisher's blurb)
1 Untitled Sheila Fitzpatrick , 1961 single work review
— Appears in: Melbourne University Magazine , Spring 1961; (p. 107-109)

— Review of A Sunday Kind of Love, and Other Stories Alan Davies , 1961 selected work short story
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