The Women in Black by Madeline St John

Everyone at our bookclub night in February, and those who sent in their comments, liked The Women in Black.

This nostalgic look at ordinary people’s lives in Sydney in the 1950s is set largely on the second floor of the F.G. Goode department store where a group of women work - young holiday casual, Lisa, and permanent employees, Fay, Patty and Miss Jacobs (we never find out her first name).

The book is a gentle satire on the mores of 1950s Australian society told through the characters and lives of these women - contrasted with the glamorous “Continental”, Magda, a migrant refugee from Slovenia who is in charge of the upmarket Model Gowns section and knows a thing or two about living life well. She takes Lisa under her wing.

It was a surprise to some of us that despite the realistic details of life in the 1950s, St John wrote the book in 1993 when she was in her 50s. Some of us wondered if there were autobiographical elements in the book. Members also reflected on the subtle undertow of feminist ideas in the book.

At one point, Lisa wants to go to university and wins a scholarship to do so but still has to seek her father’s approval of the idea since he thinks only certain types go to university. One bookclub member described the male characters in the book as a “pack of bastards” and it was interesting that other members were accepting of the way things were in those times.

This book is not a page-turner and some might seek something racier but for a pleasant interlude laced with wry humour this well crafted, well written book is a good read.

Who was Madeline St John?

For those of you who read Australian film director, Bruce Beresford’s excellent introduction to Madeleine St John in the front of the book, no further information is needed. For those of you who didn’t, read on.

Madeleine St John was an Australian writer and the first woman to be short-listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction (for her novel, The Essence of the Thing).

She was born in 1941 in Castlecrag in Sydney, the daughter of Edward St John, a prominent barrister and Liberal politician. Her mother died of suicide when Madeleine was just 12. Her father then remarried and had three sons in addition to Madeleine and her sister.

After education at a girl’s school in Mosman, Madeleine went to the University of Sydney to study Arts at the same time as Bruce Beresford, John Bell, Clive James, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes and Richard Walsh. She married a filmmaker and left Australia for San Francisco but the marriage failed after she had moved to England in 1968.

She stayed in England and worked at temporary jobs at bookshops, offices and antique stores, becoming something of a recluse. The Women in Black was her first novel and it was followed by a trilogy, A Pure Clear Light (1996), The Essence of the Thing, 1997 and A Stairway to Paradise (1999). She was working on a new novel when she died in 2006 of emphysema.

The Women in Black was adapted into the 2015 musical Ladies in Black by Tim Finn and Carolyn Burns. It has also been optioned by Bruce Beresford to be made into a film sometime. A biography of her life, Madeleine: A Life of Madeleine St John, by Helen Trinca, was published in 2013.