"Set in Australia in the 1840s, A FRINGE OF LEAVES combines dramatic action with a finely distilled moral vision. Returning home to England from Van Diemen's land, the Bristol Maid is shipwrecked on the Queensland coast and Mrs Roxburgh is taken prisoner by a tribe of aborigines, along with the rest of the passengers and crew. In the course of her escape, she is torn by conflicting loyalties - to her dead husband, to her rescuer, to her own and to her adoptive class."
Source: GoodreadsEpigraph:
'A perfect Woman, nobly planned,/To warn, to comfort, and command.'. -William Wordsworth
Dialogue between Rat-Wife and Almers from Henrik Ibsen's Little Eyolf.
'If there is some true good in a man, it can only be unknown to himself.' - Simone Weil
'Love is your last chance. There is really nothing else on earth to keep you there.' -Louis Aragon
'This paper is an analysis of the characters in Patrick Whites' A Fringe of Leaves. Bansal states :
'This paper seeks to unravel Ennen's consistent formulation and reformulation of her identities from her childhood to her stay with the Aboriginals and later with Jack Chance, an escaped convict. It further shows how the novelist's concern with history is not fetishized or partisan but an impartial one where a character plunges into both the worlds and leaves it to the readers to find out which one is more humane. It would further explore the issues of belongingness and nostalgia in terms of Ellen Roxburgh's shifts in locale.' (130)
The Structure of Two Novels by Patrick White : The Eye of the Storm (1973) and A Fringe of Leaves (1976)
1979
Z1163297
1979
single work
thesis
