Set in a department store resembling David Jones, the lives of the staff in Ladies’ Cocktails form a microcosm of Sydney society. At one end of the floor lies the ‘rosepink cave’ of Model Gowns, presided over by the sophisticated Magda from Slovenia, whose exoticism inspires fear and resentment in the saleswomen from Ladies’ Cocktails, but who proves to be a generous mentor when she takes the temporary salesgirl Lesley/Lisa under her wing. A warmly satirical comedy reminiscent of Anita Brookner or Barbara Pym, The Women in Black is unique in Australian literature. Bruce Beresford still holds the film rights.

Madeleine St John was living alone in a Notting Hill council flat when she published The Women in Black at the age of fifty-two. It was her first novel. Over the following decade she published three more, all set in London and still humorous, though darker in tone, before she died of emphysema at sixty-five. Her touch is feather-light, her palette that of a delicate miniaturist. Unknown in Australia (The Women in Black was published in London), there was a brief flurry of excitement in the Australian newspapers when St John’s third novel, The Essence of the Thing, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1997. Cambridge literature don Gillian Beer, who chaired the panel, described it as ‘a serious novel about grief ... we hear the people crack and split through her frugal, perfectly poised dialogue’. Some reviewers were less enthusiastic: the Sunday Times pronounced it ‘tripe’, and the Daily Telegraph found it ‘the last word in banality’. Andrew Riemer of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote of its author, rather patronisingly: ‘within the confines of her little world, St John strikes me as an accomplished writer.’

St John’s novels fell into obscurity until republished by Text Publishing in recent times. To complement their rebirth, Helen Trinca has done a mammoth job of researching the life of this enigmatic and secretive writer, who left little in the way of papers. Throughout her life, St John bore the scars of a tragic childhood that profoundly influenced the adult she became. Charming, opinionated, witty, abrasive, she took up and discarded friends, from her university years through her married years in the United States and on through the decades she spent in London. Unlike some fellow students from that extraordinary time at Sydney University in the 1960s, such as Clive James and Germaine Greer, St John did not remain an intentional outsider in England, but studied and absorbed Englishness until she mastered it. In her novels her observations are pitch-perfect, something perhaps the English press could not forgive when they found the Booker shortlistee who wrote with such precision about the nuances of English bourgeois society was actually Australian.

Born in 1941 to barrister and Liberal politician Edward St John and his Parisian wife, Sylvette, St John spent much of her childhood in Castlecrag, the visionary suburb on Middle Harbour designed by the Griffins in the 1920s. Her early years with her younger sister, Colette, were happy, but her life was transformed when her parents’ marriage soured as Ted St John’s career blossomed and his wife became isolated and depressed, and turned to alcohol. Institutionalised on several occasions and after several suicide attempts, Sylvette died of an overdose of barbiturates at thirty-seven, when Madeleine was twelve years old.

The intense and intelligent child with the wild red hair and pale skin was heartbroken. Her father, unable to cope with his wife’s mental illness and her even more stigmatising alcoholism, had already sent his children to boarding school; he became a cold and distant figure. St John remarried a year after Sylvette’s death, his first wife excised from his life. Madeleine, who was never given a chance to grieve for her mother, eventually became estranged from her family, bearing a lifelong and consuming bitterness towards Ted St John. 

Trinca has brought her formidable skills as an investigative journalist to the writing of Madeleine; her skills as a biographer are more limited. She sought out and interviewed friends and relatives of St John around the world, discovering letters, photographs, and a series of invaluable tapes made shortly before her death. What Madeleine wanted recorded for posterity were her memories of Castlecrag and Ted St John’s transgressions as a father; her reflections end in the 1960s and shed no light on her late writing career. Trinca is not a literary biographer and offers no analysis of St John’s novels beyond fascinating snippets from reviews and some connections between characters of the novels and their author’s life.

Madeleine St JohnThe biography’s major problems, however, derive from Trinca’s method of quoting extensively from the people she has interviewed. She lacks her subject’s skill for swift delineation of character (a novelist’s skill that forms part of a biographer’s tool kit). The multitude of names becomes tedious and sometimes confusing. Furthermore, St John is treated by her biographer as an unreliable narrator throughout the book (we are told her letters are not ‘the real Madeleine’), whereas the utterances of those interviewed about her are taken at face value. Honouring the words of people who offer reminiscences is an ethical minefield that besets biographers, but this problem is not addressed by Trinca, and the unintentional result is that the portrait of Madeleine is skewed, putting her too often at fault and making her biographer appear to lack compassion. When, in an uncanny mirroring of what had been a catalyst for her mother’s depression, the young St John accuses her husband of having an affair, his later assertion to Trinca that he did not ‘sleep’ with the woman in question is taken as proof, and Madeleine seems merely demanding and irrational.

Sylvette St John, who exerts a profound posthumous influence on the St John family, is the only protagonist who remains mute and is always spoken for. Her psychiatric records make for shocking reading and are based, as Trinca observes, largely on her husband’s version of events. She is described as a ‘vain, self-centred, lime-lighting woman’ who suffered ‘delusions’ that Ted was unfaithful. Her story is an example of the extreme gender inequalities suffered by women in the 1950s. A female psychiatrist at Broughton Hall, where St John was confined, complained about the shortcomings of the treatment, all due to the large number of women, who were forced to line up naked in a corridor outside the bathroom because of the lack of supervisory staff.

Trinca’s desire to be even-handed in her treatment of the St John family members, particularly Ted (no doubt aware that his second family would read the book), sometimes leads her to make bland statements in his favour that implicitly denigrate Madeleine and Sylvette. When his little daughters were forced to act as flower girls at Ted’s lavish second wedding, after which they were returned to their boarding school, Trinca comments: ‘Ted doubtless wanted his daughters to share in his joy, but Madeleine grew only more resentful.’ The most egregious example occurs when, after stating that Sylvette had told a doctor that her husband publicly embarrassed her by calling her a drunkard and a suicidal maniac, Trinca writes: ‘It seems unlikely that Ted would have used such words publicly – the comment suggests Sylvette was becoming increasingly irrational.’

If only Madeleine St John had been an assiduous archivist like Miles Franklin, another Australian writer who was opinionated, cranky, charming, and secretive, we might have had greater access to her complex mind and her writing. In the absence of a personal archive, Trinca has laid the foundation for more to be written about this intriguing writer and has helped bring her neglected novels to a wider reading public.