Located in the Blue Mountains in the late 1930s, this compelling story has as its centre a wealthy upper middle class family, the St. James. The focus is on Eve, the mother, and the two daughters, Stevie and Bea, and a young man who becomes a frequent visitor to the St. James' household; taken in by Eve after the death of his guardian, Angus Weekes cannot resist becoming involved in the ultimately tragic patterns of their lives. The story is told from the viewpoints of Angus (part one), Bea (part two) and Eve (part three).
Edens Lost
ABC Television
(publisher),
( dir. Neil Armfield
)
Australia
Birmingham
:
Central Independent Television
ABC Television
,
1988
Z1167993
1988
series - publisher
film/TV
Summer Locke Elliott's story, located in the Blue Mountains in the late 1930s, has as its centre a wealthy, upper-middle-class family, the St Jameses. The focus is on Mrs St James and her daughters Stevie and Bea, as a young man, Angus, becomes a frequent visitor to the household. Like the novel, the screenplay is structured in three parts. Episode 1 ('Angus') is the most Gothic and melodramatic in structure and tone; Episode 2 ('Bea') is the most naturalistic; and Episode 3 ('Eve') is the most concentrated and formally rigorous. Edens Lost is essentially a story of the unsatisfiability of female desire and the inability of the women ever to articulate this desire.
'Like many mid-century authors, Sumner Locke-Elliott fled Australia for more welcoming shores. From his first novel Careful He Might Hear You (1963), Locke-Elliott laid the foundations for a fictional self-authorship that suffused his writing with biographic detail and themes of origin, place and time. Despite his long absence from Australia and his naturalisation as an American citizen, his final novel and fictional coming out in Fairyland (1990) returns readers to the homophobic Sydney of his childhood. This blurring of biographic and fictional detail within the representational space of childhood creates an embodied literary network that connects Australia of the 1930s & 1940s and New York of the 1980s & 1990s, merging literary corpus and authorial life. Taking up this sense of presence, absence and connection, I argue that Locke-Elliot’s representation of childhood is a nostalgic point of interface that generatively refigures his oeuvre as an embodied queer and transnational literary network.' (Publication abstract)
'Like many mid-century authors, Sumner Locke-Elliott fled Australia for more welcoming shores. From his first novel Careful He Might Hear You (1963), Locke-Elliott laid the foundations for a fictional self-authorship that suffused his writing with biographic detail and themes of origin, place and time. Despite his long absence from Australia and his naturalisation as an American citizen, his final novel and fictional coming out in Fairyland (1990) returns readers to the homophobic Sydney of his childhood. This blurring of biographic and fictional detail within the representational space of childhood creates an embodied literary network that connects Australia of the 1930s & 1940s and New York of the 1980s & 1990s, merging literary corpus and authorial life. Taking up this sense of presence, absence and connection, I argue that Locke-Elliot’s representation of childhood is a nostalgic point of interface that generatively refigures his oeuvre as an embodied queer and transnational literary network.' (Publication abstract)
