Partage des connaissances

Nom canonique: Bedford, Jean
Autres noms: Bedford, Jean Gladys Agnes
Date de naissance: 1946-02-04
Sexe: female
Nationalité: Australia
Lieu de naissance: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK
Lieux de résidence: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Illawarra, New South Wales, Australia
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Études: Monash University (BA)
University of Papua New Guinea
Professions: teacher
journalist
publisher
lecturer
novelist
short-story writer
Relations: Corris, Peter (husband)

Membres

Critiques

A Lease of Summer par Jean Bedford

A Lease of Summer is a novella from my book haul from Bendigo Book Mark and at only 137 pages it's a perfect contribution to Madame Bibliophile's A Novella a Day in May.

Jean Bedford's career includes working as a teacher, journalist, editor, publisher, a lecturer in creative writing, an awards judge, and a literary consultant for the Australian Film Commission. Many of us in Australia know her as co-founder and co-editor, with Linda Funnell, of the Newtown Review of Books.

As an author, Jean Bedford (b.1946) may be best known for her recent crime fiction, but I know her from her fine novel Sister Kate (1987), recently re-released through the University of Melbourne’s Untapped program. (See my review). But if you keep your eyes peeled in second-hand shops, and maybe in libraries, you may stumble on some of her other published fiction:

Country Girl Again (1979, collection of short stories; reprinted with additional stories 1985)

Sister Kate (1982) (See my review).

Love Child (1986)

Colouring In (1986, collection of short stories with Rosemary Creswell)

To Make a Killing (1990, an Anna Southwood novel)

A Lease of Summer (1990)

Worse than Death (1992, with Tom Kelly, an Anna Southwood novel)

Signs of Murder (1993, an Anna Southwood novel)

If With a Beating Heart (1993)

Now You See Me (1997)

A Lease of Summer is set in Papua New Guinea as it transitions from a colony of Australia to independence. (Yes, that's correct, Britain shed its colonies in the wake of WW2, but Australia hung onto its colony until 1975. Read more about it here.) This is the blurb:

In the dying days of the Australian administration of Papua New Guinea, a woman joins her husband in Port Moresby, where the expatriate community still lives high on borrowed time. Helen is curious, well-meaning, eager to know the place and the people, but nothing has prepared her for the maelstrom of race and sex and politics here, nor for its inevitable and potentially tragic consequences.

The expat community is concentrated in the university, where Helen's husband David is an archaeologist among a miscellany of academics whose work is being hijacked to prepare the locals to take over in the professions. Helen is shocked to hear Ralph — a racist old fossil from the Maths department — pouring scorn on the readiness of his students, but she later hears more temperately expressed reservations about the literacy standards of the replacement teachers. There are some very smart, sophisticated locals in this milieu, but these future leaders of the independent state were educated in Australian boarding schools and universities, or elsewhere overseas. It was common knowledge in the 1970s that as administrators of the colony for well over half a century, Australia had failed to prepare PNG for independence. (Which was not a reason not to grant it, but a reason to provide sustained support thereafter.)

Helen may be 'well-meaning' as the blurb suggests, but she's a rather shallow young woman, preoccupied by the chaos of her personal life. (She is not much inconvenienced by her toddler Bea, because there is no shortage of people willing to look after her at any time.) Although she purports to want to learn and understand the people and their culture, she is more interested in gossip and innuendo, and there's plenty of that to keep everyone busy.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/05/09/a-lease-of-summer-1990-by-jean-bedford/… (plus d'informations)

Signalé

anzlitlovers | May 8, 2023 |

Sister Kate par Jean Bedford

This short novel seems to be based on the real life Kelly Gang of robbers, horse thieves and bootleggers. Kate Kelly is the younger sister of the leader, Ned Kelly, and is in love with gang member Joe Byrnes. Witnessing his violent death as a teenager, she is never able to really get over Joe. Her life becomes a series of relationships with inappropriate men, and menial jobs. Even her eventual marriage cannot erase the tragedy of losing Joe, and we watch her slowly destroy herself. This is a powerful story about the impact of loss, at a time when little support was available for survivors of violence.… (plus d'informations)

Signalé

LynnB | 1 autre critique | Jul 24, 2017 |

Now You See Me par Jean Bedford

There must be such a delicate balancing act involved when you're writing crime fiction about some of the worst possible crimes. In NOW YOU SEE ME Bedford has tackled the question of child abuse and child murder, and she's opted, bravely to do that in a most unusual manner.

The book centres around journalist Noel Baker - no stranger, as the blurb says, to the worst of human behaviour. Something twigs her investigative senses though about one particular case, and it sends her down a very dark path indeed. A young girl was killed and police were more than happy to place the blame at the feet of neglectful and abusive parents. Noel, however, isn't so convinced and she finds herself dealing with a very peculiar form of vigilante killer - and their diary - which is in itself, horrific reading. Even more so, when she realises that the killer is one of her own circle of university friends.

The balancing act is very evident in the manner in which Bedford uses the killer's journal, scattered throughout the book, to reveal their personal childhood abuse and suffering. She then switches to the other story, the deaths of a number of young children, seemingly at the hands of their abuser - somebody close to them. Meanwhile, knowing something of a killer's motivation, readers cannot help but consider whether or not somebody's own trauma is an excuse for their behaviour - for killing children as a way of stopping other perpetrators. Needless to say it's a complicated scenario, populated by a lot of characters to keep track of, which will mean that you're paying attention - making the confrontational nature of the abuse of children difficult to avoid / skip over.

Obviously NOW YOU SEE ME isn't a comfort read because of that subject matter, and the twisted and discomfortingly understandable motives of the killer. That should not be a turn-off though. This is a book that feels like it wants to tear the blinkers off and really make you think about the manner in which society tends to treat victims in particular.

https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/review-now-you-see-me-jean-bedford… (plus d'informations)

Signalé

austcrimefiction | 2 autres critiques | Feb 4, 2017 |

Sister Kate par Jean Bedford

Sister Kate, by Jean Bedford, is a slim novella from 1982, fictionalising the life of Kate Kelly, the sister of the bushranger Ned Kelly. It is no accident that the cover is graced by Sidney Nolan’s painting ‘Constable Fitzpatrick and Kate Kelly‘: Fitzpatrick’s womanising is said to have been the catalyst for Ned Kelly’s life of violent crime.

But the exploits of the Kelly Gang are not the focus of this novel. It is the effects on the women of the family that is of interest. Kate is a wild child who hero-worships her brother and believes he can do no wrong, and when by page 61 it is all over for the gang, she is left with only a demoralised brother, a mother broken by the demise of her two sons and the memory of her first love, Joe Byrne, who was shot and killed in the shootout at Glenrowan.

With nothing left but bitter memories Kate tries to make a new life. She has a stint as a barmaid, becomes an assistant to a showman who breaks in horses, and finally meets her eventual husband Bill while she is working as a domestic. Throughout this period she has been supported by a sisterhood of sorts: they are tough women with problems of their own but they care for her when she succumbs to consumption (TB) and although they have always tactfully pretended not to know who she really is, it is they who get help from the remnants of her family when things reach crisis point.

Bill’s not a bad fellow but he’s entirely inadequate to support a woman suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. Kate is haunted by the image of Joe’s burnt body on grotesque display at the Benalla Police Station, and she takes to drugs and drink to try to forget. And as she sinks further and further into a fantasy world where Joe has come back to her, her neglect of her little children shows how criminality impacts on one generation to the next.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2013/03/09/sister-kate-by-jean-bedford/… (plus d'informations)

Signalé

anzlitlovers | 1 autre critique | Aug 15, 2016 |

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