Elizabeth Jolley

Miss Peabody's Inheritance by Elizabeth Jolley

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


"Caring for her demanding, bedridden mother and confined to a dreary clerical job, Dorothy Peabody has few pleasures to sustain her until she begins a correspondence with the novelist Diana Hopewell. In this delightful story-within-a-story, the letters between a lonely, middle-aged Englishwoman and an Australian writer become a moving novel of love and the need to create. As the correspondence progresses, Miss Peabody becomes completely absorbed in the fictional travels of Hopewell's heroine, the headmistress Arabella Thorne, and her various students and companions. She discovers that the world of storytelling provides escape, but that the surprises of fiction are nothing compared to what real life has to offer."
~~ back cover

I think what turned me off of this book was the turn of both stories (the story, and the story-within-a-story) into lesbianism -- almost as if to say that no other form of love is available to women who lead sequestered lives. The admiration, friendship and attachment Miss Peabody came to feel for Diana Hopewell could have remained at that level, without beginning to explore anything further. Likewise, I found the basis for Miss Thorne's gallivantings around the Continent with a student and two women teachers in tow odd, and disturbing. Miss Thorne comes quite close to seducing the student, and the student is eager to be seduced -- being the stereotypical schoolgirl at a girl's boarding school, and thus prone to crushes on her teachers. I kept waiting for the shoe to drop -- for Miss Thorne and her particular friend to wind up in bed, and of course they do, only to be discovered by the schoolgirl, whose rosy picture of life is thus burst.

In my opinion, there were myriad other ways to explore the questions of love and the need to create, rather than the ways the author selected. They detracted from the discussion, rather than enhancing it.