Word: anthea
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Snobbish Mother. He is obsessed by the separateness of Australian man and man, of man and woman, by the loneliness and silence at the dead heart of life. Typical is Dead Roses, best of this collection of short novels and stories. Anthea Mortlock seeks herself despite her grotesquely snobbish mother, who wants her "in society." Anthea finds brief ecstasy in a scramble on the sand with a local rebel. But he indifferently leaves town, and she relapses into marriage to a rich miser of the affections. Her husband is mercifully killed in an automobile accident, and she is left...
...bald theorem, the story is nothing much. But White uses poetic means to suggest the self-defeat of a woman in whose face life has closed its door. Promised a view of an "estuary of black swans," Anthea imagines herself standing on the promontory that is covered by paperbark trees, near enough to see the writhing of the black necks. "Did she altogether want? Or touch the papery bark, flaking down, down around the grey dunny,* into opalescent scales. Sun and wind, to say nothing of moonlight, had worked upon the paper-barks. Better to watch without becoming involved...