A Portrait of a Virgin Girl (Circa 1955) single work   short story  
Issue Details: First known date: 1988... 1988 A Portrait of a Virgin Girl (Circa 1955)
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Forty-Seventeen Frank Moorhouse , Ringwood : Viking , 1988 Z356438 1988 selected work short story (taught in 1 units)

    'He is a failed writer turned diplomat, an anarchist learning the value of discipline. He moves in a world which takes him from the Australian wilderness to the conference rooms of Vienna and Geneva; from the whore-house to warzone he feels the pull of the genetic spiral of his ancestry. At the sharp axis of his mid-life he scans the memorabilia of his feelings in the hope of giving answers. In his first full-length novel Moorhouse presents a roving, dissatisfied man entering middle age in a house-of-mirrors portrait: fragmentary and multifaceted. Sean, a hard-drinking, hard-living Australian, has just turned 40; the other half of the title refers to a precocious schoolgirl who is one of his many liaisons. The most important of the other women who drift into and out of his life include his ex-wife Robyn, now unflinching in the face of cancer; Belle, Sean's fellow sexual adventurer; and Edith Campbell Berry, an aging iconoclast whom Sean encounters in Vienna and Israel. Forty-Seventeen is told with characteristic Moorhouse style — candid, wryly insightful and morbidly comic— and, in this resonant and acclaimed book, achieves a new virtuosity.' (Publication summary)

    Ringwood : Viking , 1988
    pg. 119-132

Works about this Work

My Old School, My First Love, My Troubled Memory Frank Moorhouse , 2002 single work column autobiography
— Appears in: The Age , 11 January 2002; (p. 9)
My Old School, My First Love, My Troubled Memory Frank Moorhouse , 2002 single work column autobiography
— Appears in: The Age , 11 January 2002; (p. 9)
Last amended 14 May 2001 15:34:19
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X