Barbara Hanrahan (1939-1991) was a notable Australian author who went to England in 1963 to continue her studies in art, returning to Adelaide in the early 1980s. She made an impressive career here and internationally as a painter and printmaker, and you can see some of her artworks here at the Art Gallery of NSW. But she also merits a whole column entry in the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature where they say that she was stimulated to begin writing by the death of her grandmother in 1968. You can see her list of works at Wikipedia but it’s the Companion that describes her themes and style:

A writer with a plain but suggestive prose style, Hanrahan is a brilliant creator of atmosphere. She is particularly preoccupied with the contrast between the prim respectability of nineteenth-century society, especially Adelaide society, and its seamy or horrific underside. She has described Adelaide as a ‘terribly sinister place’, and sees her novels as ‘concerned with contrasts, contradictions, beauty and horror, love and death, frivolity and menace; the precisely-detailed world of substance, the darker world of instinct; the queerness of mind split from body, the absurd fantasy of the “ordinary”. (Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, edited by William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1985, ISBN 0195542339 p.315)

Although my copy of the Companion predates the publication of A Chelsea Girl by three years, and the setting is London not Adelaide, those preoccupations are certainly on display in the novel. It took a while for me to become absorbed in the plot because – as you might expect with a setting in overcrowded working-class London at the turn of the 20th century, there are multiple characters tumbling over each other in a collage and it’s a bit hard to keep track of them all in an episodic novel. However, Sarah’s first-person narrative is vivid and Hanrahan has captured a working-class tone without overdoing it and making it a trial to read. (Though I did have to Google for the meaning of goffer (crimp or flute (a lace edge or frill) with heated irons) and for blooming sight mooby (which remains a mystery).

The book cover illustration is by Barbara Hanrahan.

To see the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/05/19/a-chelsea-girl-by-barbara-hanrahan-bookrevie... ( )