English Lesson single work   short story  
Issue Details: First known date: 1965... 1965 English Lesson
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Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Summer's Tales 2 Kylie Tennant (editor), Melbourne : Macmillan , 1965 Z247242 1965 anthology short story prose Melbourne : Macmillan , 1965
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Writing Today Charles Higham (editor), Harmondsworth : Penguin , 1968 Z285079 1968 anthology poetry short story Harmondsworth : Penguin , 1968 pg. 234-240
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Penguin Book of Australian Short Stories Harry Payne Heseltine (editor), Ringwood : Penguin , 1976 Z333518 1976 anthology short story Ringwood : Penguin , 1976 pg. 220-226
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon A Few Days in the Country : And Other Stories Elizabeth Harrower , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2015 8702143 2015 selected work short story

    'One day, Alice said, ‘Eric Lane wants to take me to—’

    'For the first time, her mother attended, standing still.

    'Eric was brought to the house, and Eric and Alice were married before there was time to say ‘knife’. How did it happen? She tried to trace it back. She was watching her mother performing for Eric, and then (she always paused here in her mind), somehow, she woke up married and in another house.

    'Internationally acclaimed for her five brilliant novels, Elizabeth Harrower is also the author of a small body of short fiction. A Few Days in the Country brings together for the first time her stories published in Australian journals in the 1960s and 1970s, along with those from her archives—including ‘Alice’, published for the first time earlier this year in the New Yorker.

    'Essential reading for Harrower fans, these finely turned pieces show a broader range than the novels, ranging from caustic satires to gentler explorations of friendship.' (Publication summary)

    Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2015
    pg. 155-164

Works about this Work

Moments of Being in the Fiction of Elizabeth Harrower Elizabeth McMahon , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Elizabeth Harrower : Critical Essays 2017; (p. 137-148)
'In her poetic catalogues of being and experience, Emily Dickinson records the chasm between the visibility of the world, including the poetic image, and the invisibility of inner transformation. In one such poem she writes: “We can find no scar / But internal difference – / Where the Meanings, Are –”.  Elizabeth Harrower’s fiction investigates this “internal difference” in both its invisibile [sic] and its hypervisible effects, and understood in the related senses of transformation, individuation and self-division. In these representations, Harrower deploys a very particular version of the modernist epiphany or moment of being. In her novels and short stories this epiphany characteristically interweaves and disentangles the subjects and objects of the narratives. One recurring revelation exposes the ways some human subjects wire themselves and others through the objects of postwar consumer culture to expose how (mostly) women can become relegated to object status in and through these dynamics. In another mode, Harrrower’s narratives record moments of instant, electrical connection between strangers, who are otherwise isolated. Across the spectrum of these interactions, as this essay will investigate, the revelations experienced by Harrower’s characters are always intersubjective – even if the ultimate revelation is solitary and about the condition of being solitary in the world. This essay will identify at least some of the key properties of Harrower’s epiphanies and consider how they relate to narrative mode and genre by moving between her short fiction and the novels. Ranging across these different genres, in view of their respective relationships to realism and their capacities to represent temporality and causality, underscores the operations of her particular postwar, postmodern epiphany and its centrality to her understanding of being in the world.' (Introduction)
Moments of Being in the Fiction of Elizabeth Harrower Elizabeth McMahon , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Elizabeth Harrower : Critical Essays 2017; (p. 137-148)
'In her poetic catalogues of being and experience, Emily Dickinson records the chasm between the visibility of the world, including the poetic image, and the invisibility of inner transformation. In one such poem she writes: “We can find no scar / But internal difference – / Where the Meanings, Are –”.  Elizabeth Harrower’s fiction investigates this “internal difference” in both its invisibile [sic] and its hypervisible effects, and understood in the related senses of transformation, individuation and self-division. In these representations, Harrower deploys a very particular version of the modernist epiphany or moment of being. In her novels and short stories this epiphany characteristically interweaves and disentangles the subjects and objects of the narratives. One recurring revelation exposes the ways some human subjects wire themselves and others through the objects of postwar consumer culture to expose how (mostly) women can become relegated to object status in and through these dynamics. In another mode, Harrrower’s narratives record moments of instant, electrical connection between strangers, who are otherwise isolated. Across the spectrum of these interactions, as this essay will investigate, the revelations experienced by Harrower’s characters are always intersubjective – even if the ultimate revelation is solitary and about the condition of being solitary in the world. This essay will identify at least some of the key properties of Harrower’s epiphanies and consider how they relate to narrative mode and genre by moving between her short fiction and the novels. Ranging across these different genres, in view of their respective relationships to realism and their capacities to represent temporality and causality, underscores the operations of her particular postwar, postmodern epiphany and its centrality to her understanding of being in the world.' (Introduction)
Last amended 13 Jan 2009 12:49:30
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