Joan Lindsay - WikiHQ

Joan à Beckett Weigall, Lady Lindsay (16 November 189623 December 1984) was an Australian novelist, playwright, essayist, and visual artist. Trained in her youth as a painter, she published her first literary work in 1936 at age forty under a pseudonym, a satirical novel titled Through Darkest Pondelayo. Her second novel, Time Without Clocks, was published nearly thirty years later, and was a semi-autobiographical account of the early years of her marriage to artist Sir Daryl Lindsay.

In 1967, Lindsay published her most celebrated work, Picnic at Hanging Rock, a historical Gothic novel detailing the vanishing of three schoolgirls and their teacher at the site of a monolith during one summer. The novel sparked critical and public interest for its ambivalent presentation as a true story as well as its vague conclusion, and is widely considered to be one of the most important Australian novels. It was adapted into a 1975 film of the same name.

She was also the author of several unpublished plays, and contributed essays, short stories, and poetry to numerous journals and publications throughout her career. After the death of Lindsay's husband in 1976, she spent her time involved in the local art community in Melbourne, and was involved in several exhibitions. Her last published work, Syd Sixpence (1982), was her first and only work of children's literature. Lindsay died of stomach cancer in 1984, after which her home was donated to the Australian National Trust; the Lindsay estate now operates as a museum with her and her husband Daryl's artwork and personal effects.

Life and career

Early life

thumb|left|150px|alt=A photo of a young Joan Lindsay, posed in a school photograph|Lindsay in a 1914 school photograph

Joan à Beckett Weigall was born in St Kilda East, Victoria, Australia, a suburb of Melbourne, the third daughter of Theyre à Beckett Weigall, a prominent judge. His cousin, William Arthur Callendar à Beckett, was father to Emma Minnie Boyd and thus Lindsay was related to the Boyd family including writer Martin Boyd. Her mother, Ann Sophie Weigall (née Hamilton), was the daughter of the Scottish born Sir Robert Hamilton, a Governor of Tasmania; she was a musician born and raised in Dublin. Lindsay had two sisters, Mim and Nancy, and a brother, Theyre Jr. and exhibited with the Victorian Artists Society. Joan became known as Lady Lindsay.

Her semi-autobiographical novel Time Without Clocks describes her wedding and idyllic early married life. The work takes its title from a strange ability which Joan described herself as having, of stopping clocks and machinery when she came close. The title also plays on the idea that this period in her life was unstructured and free. This was followed with Facts Soft and Hard, a humorous, semi-autobiographical account of the Lindsays' travels in the United States while Daryl was on a Fulbright Award, at her home Mulberry Hill in Baxter, on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, and constructed it around the real-life Hanging Rock, a monolith that had fascinated her since her childhood. She compared the story to the work of Henry James, citing the "book about the children in a haunted house with a governess" (The Turn of the Screw).

The novel is historical fiction, though Lindsay dropped hints that it was based on an actual event, and is framed as such in the novel's introduction. An ending that explained the girls' fates, in draft form, was excised by her publisher prior to publication. The final chapter was published only in 1987 as a standalone book titled The Secret of Hanging Rock, and also included critical commentary and interpretive theories on the novel. Lindsay based Appleyard College, the setting for the novel, on the school that she had attended, Clyde Girls Grammar School (Clyde School), at East St Kilda, Melbourne—which in 1919 was transferred to Woodend, Victoria, in the immediate vicinity of Hanging Rock.

In a 1974 interview, Lindsay addressed readers' and critics' questioning about the novel's ambiguous conclusion, saying:<blockquote>Well, it was written as a mystery and it remains a mystery. If you can draw your own conclusions, that's fine, but I don't think that it matters. I wrote that book as a sort of atmosphere of a place, and it was like dropping a stone into the water. I felt that story, if you call it a story—that the thing that happened on St. Valentine's Day went on spreading, out and out and out, in circles.

Lindsay's visual artwork has been exhibited posthumously as part of the National Women's Art Exhibition in Australia.

Books

Through Darkest Pondelayo (Chatto & Windus, 1936)
Time Without Clocks (F. W. Cheshire, 1962)
Facts Soft and Hard (F. W. Cheshire, 1964)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (F. W. Cheshire, 1967)
The Secret of Hanging Rock (F. W. Cheshire, 1987) (excised final chapter to Picnic at Hanging Rock, published posthumously in 1987)
Syd Sixpence (Kestrel Books, 1982)

Short stories

"Holiday", The Home, 5, 2, 1923.
"Yellow Roses", The Home, 5, 5, 1924.
"The Awakening", Table Talk Annual, Christmas 1924.
"Good with Cats", Bulletin, 101, 5221, 22 July 1980.

Journal contributions

Unpublished works

Plays

Wolf! (1930)
Spring Tangle ()
Cataract (1940)
My Kingdom for a Chocolate Blancmange! A tragedy in fifty thousand acts. With apologies to William Shakespeare, Thornton Wilder and some very fine artists (1948)
Floreat Anglesea (1950)
This Modern Art (1951)

Novels and memoirs

Love at the Billabong (1978); novel, unfinished
Alma Road (1979); autobiography, unfinished
Love and Information (1982); novella

References

Sources

External links

Joan Lindsay profile, Australian Dictionary of National Biography
Lady Joan Lindsay profile Design & Art Australia Online
Theyre à Beckett Weigall (1860–1926), gravesite of Lady Joan's father, Brighton General Cemetery website