'Isobel Callaghan is struggling to make a career as a writer in Sydney. She is isolated, poor and hungry, and fears she’s going mad. Leaving her room in a boarding house in search of food, she has a breakdown on the way to the corner shop.
'Waking in hospital, Isobel learns that she will be confined to a sanatorium in the Blue Mountains. There, among the motley assortment of patients, and with the aid of great works of literature, she will confront the horrors of her past. But can she find a way to face the future?
'Confronting and compassionate, profound and funny, the second Isobel Callaghan novel is every bit as brilliant as its much-loved predecessor. It confirmed Amy Witting as one of the finest Australian writers of her time.' (Text Classic summary)
I for Isobel
Ringwood
:
Penguin
,
1989
Z391185
1989
single work
novel
'This was life: no sooner had you built yourself your little raft and felt secure than it came to pieces under you and you were swimming again.
'Born into a world without welcome, Isobel observes it as warily as an alien trying to pass for a native. Her collection of imaginary friends includes the Virgin Mary and Sherlock Holmes. Later she meets Byron, W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot. Isobel is not so much at ease with the flesh-and-blood people she meets, and least of all with herself, until a lucky encounter and a little detective work reveal her identity and her true situation in life.' (Publication summary)
'This article examines ways in which the fiction of the acclaimed Australian writer Amy Witting, dubbed Australia’s Chekov and whom Helen Garner acknowledged as her ‘literary mother,’ interrogates the disempowerment of women in the domestic sphere, asserting that the home is a contested space and conflicted place for women. Witting subverts the notion that a ‘woman’s place is in the home’ by demonstrating that many
women are actually displaced and dispossessed in the inhibiting domestic spaces that are their ‘homes.’ In her fiction, women are isolated and excluded because of gender inequity
in regard to women’s rights and duties in the domestic sphere. Women are also marginalised in regard to inadequate financial rewards for domestic productivity and are affected by circumstances underpinned by discourses of poverty, class conflict and domestic violence. Witting asserts that the disempowerment of women in the home often leads to women appropriating masculinist attitudes and behaviours of oppression towards other women less powerful than themselves. In this article, these concepts are explored with close reference to five of Witting’s novels and interviews conducted with the author.' (Author's abstract)
'The treatment of psychological disorders of all kinds and, more largely, of the deterioration of the mind, gradually made its mark in Australian novels in the early 1970s and gave rise to a series of books concerned with mental health issues. The six narratives I have selected for this study-David Ireland's The Flesheaters (1972), Walter Adamson's The Institution (1976), Peter Kocan's two you-narration novellas The Treatment (1980) and The Cure (1983), Carmel Bird's The White Garden (1995), and Amy Witting's Isobela on the Way to the Corner Shop (1999)-all partake of this new trend. This belated literary awakening to insanity is all the stranger seeing that creativity and madness have often been paired, both being particularly apt at articulating the relationship between freedom and constraint, mental representation and reality, the individual and society.' (Author's introduction)
'The treatment of psychological disorders of all kinds and, more largely, of the deterioration of the mind, gradually made its mark in Australian novels in the early 1970s and gave rise to a series of books concerned with mental health issues. The six narratives I have selected for this study-David Ireland's The Flesheaters (1972), Walter Adamson's The Institution (1976), Peter Kocan's two you-narration novellas The Treatment (1980) and The Cure (1983), Carmel Bird's The White Garden (1995), and Amy Witting's Isobela on the Way to the Corner Shop (1999)-all partake of this new trend. This belated literary awakening to insanity is all the stranger seeing that creativity and madness have often been paired, both being particularly apt at articulating the relationship between freedom and constraint, mental representation and reality, the individual and society.' (Author's introduction)
