Helen Elliott is a leading Australian literary critic and essayist whose work is extensively published in newspapers and journals. ‘Eleven Letters to You’ is a memoir of her search of lost time, striking in its originality and deeply moving in its remembrance of her liberation from the stultification of suburban life in Melbourne in the middle years of the last century.

Place is important in the bleak sociology of those decades. Boronia, where her memoir begins, is situated in the shadows of the Dandenong Ranges, a dormitory suburb now, thirty kilometres from Melbourne. In the fifties it was semi-rural with orchards and flower plantations. The name is derived from the fragrant shrub Boronia metastigma, native to Western Australia, but widely cultivated commercially. Helen and her parents lived in a rudimentary house of weatherboard and fibrolite in this beautiful place. The family was treading water financially. Her father Jack was a gambler and profligate in his generosity. He suited up and buffed his shoes to a high polish before the daily commute to his job in Melbourne, but the soles were worn out and lined with cardboard. His wife Eileen was not permitted to take a job. Feminism would come late to Boronia: no-one there was reading The Feminine Mystique in the sixties. There was ‘no alternative to the specialised unhappiness of an unhappy marriage in those days’. Love, more unsparing than anger, shapes Helen’s narrative of her parents’ embittered marriage that gradually unfolds through the course of her memoir.

Eleven Letters spans the years between 1950 when Helen was three and 1969 when she finally surmounts the restraining influences of class, gender and family injunctions against excessive ambition and scrapes together the resources to enrol at Monash University: ‘The World that I had imagined for so many years started to define itself’. In those decades university was reserved for the children of the upper-middle classes, usually boys and usually educated in private schools. Once at Monash Helen rejoices in an intoxicating milieu of talkative, argumentative people with whom she could share her wit and intelligence. The eleven letters are written in gratitude to the neighbours, teachers, friends and colleagues who shaped her childhood and adolescence and inspired her aspirations. She characterises her memoir as the hinge holding their lives together. These are mostly posthumous expressions of love: few of the nine women and two men whom she remembers in these letters are still alive.

The letters trace her developing independence from earliest childhood. The first is to Elfreda and Viola, spinster sisters who lived nearby in Boronia. They were old and sprightly, had served as nurses in Egypt in WW1 and loved her as if she had been their own child. They were exotic. Their voices were as light as filigree. They told her about the apricot-coloured sunrises in the Egyptian desert and shared their joy in gardening with her. In Autumn their fowls got tipsy from eating fermenting windfall plums. Their kitchen glittered with cleanliness. Then in the swift succession of Helen’s childhood years, Elfreda and Viola grew old and incapable and had to be taken away. Other mentors followed. Spiky Mrs Hannacker, who cropped her hair and wore mannish clothing and men’s shoes. Another gardener and demanding - Snail vine is ‘mauve, not lilac, learn the difference, Helen Elliott’. Mrs Hannacker told Helen that she must plant a quince tree in her garden wherever she lived, an instruction she has observed in every one of her gardens. Much later when she was 17, skipping intervening mentors, there was Mr Cohen, fiftyish and fragrant, who became her supervisor when she was employed as junior clerk in the Commonwealth Post-Master General’s department. She developed an intensely sexual ‘crush’ on him. She felt out of place among the other office girls. She was bored by the newsy tedium and sniping raillery of their conversations. She spent her lunchbreak reading, engrossed in the imaginary life of Europe, Russia or England that books enabled, a life of ‘not being a clerk, not being Helen from Boronia’. The other girls said she came from another planet and called her Greta Garbo because she looked like that old film star. She read too much they said. She was disconnected and disaffected with her job when Arthur Cohen, in a moment of intense, mutual and unexpressed erotic attraction, told her that ‘a beautiful girl like you doesn’t belong here’. She was aware that he spoke from his own unhappiness and forgone aspirations. But he took no advantage of her vulnerability. Later, when she resigned, he said that ‘leaving this place’ was the best possible thing for her to do: ‘You need a library and a university, Helen’. He was another, lovingly remembered, who helped her to find an identity.

Eleven Letters to You is an intimate history of Helen’s liberation from the oppressive misogyny of those post-war years. It is penetrating in its intelligence, gorgeously written and often very funny. ( )

Sunday Extra 03:03:24
“The Year That Made Me, 1979”
A warm lively interview.

Age Review 3:06:23 Spectrum with a wonderful photo - vase of flowers and grey windswept hair, head supported on soft curved arthritic hand and and elbow. It’s very unlike the much younger portrait in the back of her book. This is the photo that should have been published , why wasn’t it ?