‘What have you brought me Hester? What have you brought me from the shop?’ / ‘I’ve brought Katherine, Father,’ Miss Harper said. ‘I’ve brought Katherine, but she’s for me.’
It had been a harsh, lonely life for spinster Hester Harper on the isolated farm in Western Australia, with only her elderly, ailing father for companionship. Then, “partly out of pity and aptly out of fancy,” she brought the young orphan girl to stay with them. Katherine was eager to work and to learn, and Hester’s emotionally impoverished life began to flower as the two cooked and sewed and ran the farm and made music for each other’s entertainment. It was all so beautiful–until the night they ran into a mysterious creature (or was it a human being?) on a rutted country road on the way home from a dance. Even after Hester deposited the evidence in the farm’s deep well, the injured voice at the bottom would not be stilled. Most disturbing of all, the closer Katherine is drawn to the edge of the recess, the farther away she gets from Hester.
A haunting, deeply resonant tale of obsessive attachment and sexual awakening, The Well demonstrates once again that Elizabeth Jolley is a writer of wit, high moral purpose, and great conviction. Reviewing her previous novel, Foxybaby, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Carolyn See wrote: “This is prose, thought, and art of the highest elegance and caliber.” The same, and more, can be said of this compassionate, extremely moving, and beautifully articulated new work.
