Background
Jessica Anderson was born in Gayndah, Queensland, to an English mother and an Irish father but brought up in Brisbane. She left school at 16 and attended the Brisbane Technical College Art School for a year, but moved to Sydney when she was 18 and was drawn into the bohemian life there. She lived most of her life in Sydney, though she also lived in London for two and a half years. In an interview with Ellison, Anderson said that she always wanted to be a writer or an artist and that as a child she always wrote—poetry and stories. She also said that she thought about being an architect but that this seemed impossible for a woman in the Brisbane of her youth. She came from a politically active family and joined the Australian Labor Party in 1976. Anderson was twice divorced, her first husband being the artist Ross McGrill. She had one daughter, the film and television script-writer, Laura Jones. She died in Sydney aged 93 on 9 July 2010.
Career
She started writing novels in her early 40s, but had written stories and plays and adapted novels for radio prior to that. Most of these earlier works were published under pseudonyms. In interviews with Ellison and Baker she said that she received more rejections as her writing got better and she moved away from "formula". She was first published in the early 1960s. Since then, she has had several novels published and her short stories have appeared in magazines including The Bulletin, Meanjin and Heat. Anderson's novels do not tackle broad social, political or historical issues head-on. Rather, the large event, the major issue, is always in the background, while her characters move in a world where small personal experiences, experiences which are as nothing on a world scale, profoundly influence them.Anderson is fascinated by the tug between the old culture (Europe) and the new (Australia).
In her novels, arrival is always part of a longer journey, an inner journey as well as a physical one, and thus relates to the acquiring of wisdom and the conflicting desires for flight and sanctuary. To arrive at an unfamiliar place normally sharpens one's awareness of environment, and descriptions of place—particularly of houses, and the harbour and gardens of Sydney, shown as being deeply part of the consciousness of the women characters in particular—are among the strengths of Anderson's later novels.
Views
Quotations:
"I was very much, and always have been, preoccupied with people who are strangers in their society."
