What is it about the Australian Text Classics list that’s so appealing? The North York branch of the Toronto Public Library has quite a few of them, including Elizabeth Harrower’s The Long Prospect (1958) which I’m happy to read for Brona’s Books Australian Reading Month.

What I enjoyed about this novel is how astutely Harrower captures that in-between feeling of a twelve-year-old girl poised between childhood and adulthood.

What I did not enjoy is how astutely Harrower captures that in-between feeling of a twelve-year-old girl poised between childhood and adulthood.

At one point, Emily is out for a walk and puts her hand on a wooden post and thinks about how it was once a sapling; I remember that sharp sense of time passing and a keen awareness of mortality that didn’t fit with childhood at all.

I’d been a sickly kid and was bumped up in school after having been enrolled later due to poor health—first one of the oldest in the class and, then, one of the youngest in another. I didn’t fit and spent a lot of time alone with my own thoughts, with my fledgling understanding, and I could relate to Emily’s isolation in small settlements where there was really one acceptable way to be.

Emily does connect with someone who seems to naturally understand her way of seeing the world, who doesn’t judge her for wanting something other than what the other adults around her seem satisfied to have—something different.

There’s a “shifting of key in Emily, a translation to a deeper level of reality, a translation to herself.”  What a brilliant description. I longed for that myself, and her sense of astonishment and gratitude, her deep feeling and fondness, felt almost painfully real, particularly when she finds herself alone once again. Having discovered what acceptance feels like, tolerance is no longer enough.

All of the characters are depicted with compassion, including Emily’s grandmother Lilian—with whom Emily’s living at this time:

“If more properly the responsibility belonging to Paula and Harry Lawrence, there was the fact that Lilian herself had failed one of them. But who had handled Lilian? And who, that person? How far back must one go to find the root of human imperfection? Thea wondered. And in which direction first?”

As well as Emily’s mother Paula, whose marriage is a disappointment:

“Dislike, warped passion, non-comprehension—nothing could outweigh the inner, unconscious, fabulously romantic idea of marriage—themselves the hero and heroine: to part would have been to live life deprived.”

But readers reside most often with Emily. There are no easy answers.

“Where were her people? Where were the others like her, to keep her company? And where was she to look for help or information? She might, she felt, have been told something before being dropped off in Ballowra.” [Ballowra is a fictionalised Newcastle.]

This is my first of Harrower’s novels, but I hope to read The Watch Tower next. I’m also hoping to reread Miles Franklins’ My Brilliant Career and read, for the first time, its sequel (which I’ve nattered on about reading for, oh, maybe a decade now, which means it’s more likely two).

Just how long is Australian Reading Month anyway? Thanks to Brona for hosting and encouraging me to finally make good on a readolution…or two.