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Eve Langley

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Eve Maria Langley (1904-1974). Courtesy Te Ara: Encyclopedia of New Zealand.

Eve Maria Langley (1 September 1904 - circa 1 June 1974) was an Australian and New Zealand poet and novelist.[1] Her novels belong to a tradition of Australian women's writing that explores the conflict between being an artist and being a woman.

Life[]

Langley was born born Ethel Jane Langley in Forbes, New South Wales, the eldest daughter of carpenter Arthur Alexander Langley (died 1915), and his wife Myra (Davidson), both of whom came from Victoria. Eve's mother was disinherited as the result of her marriage and the family spent much of its life in poverty.[2]

After Arthur died, Myra returned to Victoria, initially managing her brother's hotel at Crossover. Eve and her sister June attended several schools in New South Wales and Victoria, including Brunswick Central and Dandenong State Schools, and Dandenong High School.[3]

In the 1920s Eve and her sister worked their way around the countryside of Gippsland as agricultural laborers, which experience forms the base of Eve's earliest novel, The Pea Pickers.

In 1932 Langley followed her mother and sister to New Zealand, and in 1937 (aged 32) she married a 22-year old art student, Hilary Clark.[3] They had 3 children: a daughter, Bisi Arilev, and 2 sons, Langley Rhaviley and Karl Marx.[3]

In 1942, her husband had her admitted to Auckland Mental Hospital where she stayed until she was released into her sister's care in 1949. She was divorced in 1952.[3]

Langley worked in Auckland as a book repairer, 1950-1955, and then visited Australia, 1956-1957, where she traveled extensively through the east coast.[4] She traveled to the United Kingdom in 1959-1960. In 1960 she returned to New South Wales, where she remained for the rest of her life, except for a trip to Greece.[3]

In her latter years she became extremely reclusive, living in a shack in the Katoomba bush in the Blue Mountains. She became increasingly eccentric, wearing 'mannish clothes' and a white topi and always wore a knife in her belt.[5] Dale Spender writes that much has been written of her eccentricities, such as the wearing of trousers, and says that "it is distressing to find that sometimes there is more comment about her eccentricities as a person than about the strengths of her writing".[6] Langley claimed Oscar Wilde as her alter ego, going so far as to officially take that name by deed poll in 1954. Her work presents many clues to her enigmatic life. The manuscripts of 10 of her unpublished novels are held among her papers in the Mitchell Library.

Hal Porter wrote in 1965 about many of the writers he had met, and said that "of them all, Eve Langley is the one with whom, on a first meeting, I spent the most dazzling day, enlivened by the unforeseen".[7]

She spent the last years of her life living alone in the Blue Mountains. She died alone at home sometime between 1 and 13 June 1974, but her body was not found until about 3 weeks after her death.[3]

Writing[]

Langley made a name for herself as a writer in New Zealand in the 1930s where, with Douglas Stewart, Gloria Rawlinson, and Robyn Hyde, her poetry was regularly published in magazines.[3] McLeod writes that she was "by the late thirties known in New Zealand literary circles as a promising poet".[8] She continued to be published as a poet after her return to Australia, with her poems appearing in magazines like The Bulletin. Her poem "Native-born" regularly appears in Australian anthologies. Her journalism and short stories were also published in the 1930s and 1940s, and occasionally in the 1950s.[9]

While Langley wrote consistently throughout her life, she had only 2 novels published in her lifetime. 10 other novels are held in the Mitchell Library in manuscript form.

She wrote actively during her 20s - journals, letters, poems and stories - and some of these writings were used in her semi-autobiographical novel, The Pea-Pickers, which was published in 1942. The Pea-Pickers has been described as "a fanciful, autobiographical, first-person narrative of the adventures of two young women, 'Steve' and 'Blue' who seek excitement, love and 'poetry' in rural Gippsland".[10] Her 2nd novel, White Topee, is a sequel. Langley often referred to herself as 'Steve' in her journals.

In an interview in 1964, Langley described her writing process as "embroidery of literature" and saw herself as "one who chatters and embroiders all the time, endlessly, a great fantasy of romance".[9] McLeod describes her as "a subtle, ironic and complex novelist"[11] and says that her best voice is "sometimes lyrical, sometimes cynical, with a marvellous descriptive flair and an ear for dialogue".[12]

Suzanne Falkiner, writing about women writing about the wilderness, suggests that "Those rare women who have deliberately gone into the landscape alone, and not trailing in the tracks of a protective husband - from Daisy Bates in the 1880s to Eve Langley in the 1930s and Robyn Davidson in the 1970s - have often had to combat being considered eccentric, or even mad".[13]

Makowiecka suggests that Langley's novels - published and unpublished - fall into 2 groups. The 1st group - The Pea-Pickers, White Topee, Wild Australia, The Victorians and Bancroft House - "reconfigures her life in Gippsland, intermingling this story with those of the bushmen and women of the 1880s, and further embellishing her text with poems, playlets, songs and paeans of praise addressed to ancient gods and mythical lands".[9]

The 2nd group - all unpublished - cover her departure for and life in New Zealand. In them she again entwines her stories, but "now with apparently current and factual journal entries tangled in the genre-blurring tapestry of poetry, fantasy and multi-faceted subjectivity".[9]

Makiowiecka also states that time, memory and land are regularly revisited in her writing. She writes of time both in terms of a large historical perspective and the more personal quotidian one.[14] She explores the processes of memory and that which is remembered, and how this is incorporated into the mind and thence into immortality.[15] She calls the land "'sacred earth' of western antiquity, and ... of an equally mythic 'Australia'"[15] and writes that she "picked up a new piece of mind from every piece of different landscape I saw".[16] In other words, "as she rides and writes, [she] is creating herself in a self-creating landscape".[15] In her writing time, memory and the land are entwined in such a way that they affect and are affected by each other.

Publishing the unpublished[]

Various attempts have been made over the years to publish some of the 10 unpublished novels. McLeod describes how she and her colleague, Anita Segerburg, edited the unpublished Auckland novels in 1993-1994, but says that they were not published due to permission being refused by Langley's daughter, Bisi.[17]

Lucy Frost's Wilde Eve, another editing of the New Zealand novels, was published in 1999. In her introduction to this work, Frost writes "She was Eve Langley and Oscar Wilde, Australian woman and English man - poet caught in the woe of World War II and immortal, one of the ancients come again to life".[18] Despite this, the Wilde obsession plays little part in the book, with Frost, herself, admitting that "the narrator's other is Steve, not Oscar Wilde",[17] Steve being the name Langley used for her 1st-person narrator in The Pea-Pickers and other writings.

Recognition[]

In 1940 Langley won the S.H. Prior Memorial Prize (run by The Bulletin), for The Pea-Pickers, (shared with Kylie Tennant's The Battlers and Malcolm Henry Ellis' John Murtagh Macrossan lectures)

In popular culture[]

Mark O'Flynn's play titled Eleanor and Eve speculates what might have happened had Australian writers Eve Langley and Eleanor Dark met. While both lived in the Katoomba area at the same time, Dark from 1934 and Langley from the early 1960s to 1974, there is no evidence that they ever met. The play was originally performed in 2002 at Varuna, Eleanor Dark's home which is now a writers' centre, with the audience moving between rooms as the play progressed. In 2003, it was performed in a more traditional space at the Railway St. Theatre in Penrith, New South Wales.[19]

Australian-born dancer (now resident in Canada) Elizabeth Langley developed an hour-long multimedia dance-theatre performance about Eve Langley called Journal of Pedal Dreams. It explores Langley's struggles with "the competing demands of motherhood, wifehood and the creative muse".[20] The show was performed in Australia and Canada in 2003 and 2004. It contains few spoken lines and incorporates projections of Langley's poetry and journal entries. It was based on research undertaken by Elizabeth Langley and Australian Paul Rainsford Towner.[21]

Publications[]

Novels[]

  • The Pea-Pickers. Sydney & London: Angus & Robertson, 1942.
    • published in U.S. as Not Yet the Moon. New York: Dutton, 1946.
  • White Topee. Sydney & London: Angus & Robertson, 1954.

Non-fiction[]

  • Wilde Eve: Eve Langley's story (edited by Lucy Frost). Milsons Point, NSW: Vintage / New York: Random House, 1999.


Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.[22]

See also[]

References[]

Notes[]

  1. ↑ Langley, Eve Maria, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Encyclopedia of New Zealand, TeAra.govt.nz, Web, Mar. 17, 2012.
  2. ↑ HarperCollins
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 Thwaite (2000)
  4. ↑ State Library of New South Wales
  5. ↑ Wilde, et al. (1994)
  6. ↑ Spender (1988) p. 298
  7. ↑ Porter (1965) p. 45
  8. ↑ McLeod (1999) p. 176
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 Makowiecka (2002) p. 181
  10. ↑ Adelaide (1988) p. 113
  11. ↑ McLeod (1999) p. 170
  12. ↑ McLeod (1999) p. 173
  13. ↑ Falkiner (1992) p. 119
  14. ↑ Makowiecka (2002) p. 181-2
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 Makowiecka (2002) p. 182
  16. ↑ cited from Langley's Wild Australia by Makowiecka (2002) p. 182
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 McLeod (1999) p. 166
  18. ↑ cited by McLeod (1999) p. 166
  19. ↑ Taffel (2003)
  20. ↑ Elkins (2004)
  21. ↑ Studio 303
  22. ↑ Search results = au:Eve Maria Langley, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Nov. 1, 2014.

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