Debra Adelaide evokes Emily Bronte in The Women’s Pages

Debra Adelaide has structured The Women’s Pages to celebrate Wuthering Heights and to create her own puzzle box.

In The Women’s Pages, Debra Adelaide ‘charts the impact of second-wave feminism on her characters’.

Dove, the writer-protagonist of one strand of The Women’s Pages, puzzles over the physics of the narrative she is producing. Its anatomy and energies mystify her even as they haul her along to discover them. Dove’s own protagonist, Ellis, is like ‘‘the fourth or fifth figure in a set of babushka dolls’’. The number of dolls that can nest within the largest doll depends on the skill and dexterity of the matryoshka artist. The innermost doll is a baby, the only doll that does not open to include smaller versions, or progeny.

Dove might think of herself as the artist, but she is the largest of Debra Adelaide’s own dolls in this intricately crafted novel. Wrapped around these nesting dolls is Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, itself housing narratives within narratives, a structure that baffled contemporary critics. In another of her novels, The Household Guide to Dying (2008), Adelaide’s protagonist Delia describes Bronte’s novel as having a ‘‘fussy trick-box narrative’’ that she knows is ‘‘brilliant’’ even as it frustrates her.

The inventive structure of The Women’s Pages allows Adelaide to celebrate Wuthering Heights and to create her own puzzle box with secret compartments and ingenious tricks, its mysteries unlocking new narrative layers.

The novel has grown from The Sleepers in that Quiet Earth, a story in Adelaide’s 2013 short-story collection Letter to George Clooney, which opens with an epigraph from Charlotte Bronte’s preface to the 1850 edition of her sister’s novel: ‘‘Having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done.’’

Dove, whose tale is set in the inner-west of Sydney in the present, begins writing the story of Ellis after reading Wuthering Heights to her dying mother, and is similarly surprised by her own characters. She is amused to discover that her portrait of Ellis’s life in the 1960s is ‘‘plausibly domestic’’. Dove is able to describe Ellis’s secret recipe for asparagus rolls as if she herself has made them all her life. Ellis is aware that after the war ‘‘everything has been turned upside down and inside out’’.

Dove’s transformation involves different questions and centres on reading and writing. She gives up her work as a graphic designer, tired of ‘‘wringing out some perkiness, some fun, some cartoonish approach’’. When Ellis, placing her asparagus rolls alongside other canapes produced from The Australian Women’s Weekly Cookbook, thinks that ‘‘she would be happy never to see an angel on horseback again’’, Adelaide evokes another novel, Elizabeth Jolley’s Miss Peabody’s Inheritance (1983).

Like Dove, Dorothy Peabody wearies of ­office work and is transformed by reading. Dorothy’s father read Great Expectations to her as a child, and she imagines the possibility of being, as Dickens’s protagonist Pip is by the convict, turned upside down and shaken. Dorothy starts a correspondence with writer Diana Hopewell, who sends her drafts of her novel-in-progress Angels on Horseback, the structure of which ‘‘is so complicated that, in my notes, I have to use different colours’’ for each character. The developing manuscript of Angels on Horseback is folded into Miss Peabody’s Inheritance and becomes Dorothy’s inheritance.

At the centre of Adelaide’s marvellously intertextual narrative nests the question of motherhood. Dove dreams of herself near Top Withens, the abandoned house said to have inspired Wuthering Heights, and when she wakes, she imagines watching Emily Bronte burying a small wrapped package. Charlotte Bronte may have died from severe morning sickness, and wrote that the saddest image is of ‘‘a woman looking down at her empty arms’’.

Dove is sceptical about rogue biographers’ suggestions that Emily suffered a miscarriage, and uncomprehending of Ellis’s choice between a baby and her career. Dove is not unlike the writers Virginia Woolf describes in A Room of One’s Own when she notes that the authors of Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch were all ‘‘women without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman’’, defying the prohibitions of the internalised voice of a ‘‘too-conscientious governess’’ to venture, as Jane Eyre herself does, on to the roof, hoping for ‘‘a power of vision which might … reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen’’. In the context of Adelaide’s sharp analysis, the book’s mawkish cover seems a discordant choice.

Reading and writing are central to Adelaide’s work and The Women’s Pages extends into fiction the work of her collection The Simple Act of Reading, published earlier this year. In layering the lives of two generations of women reading and writing, Adelaide charts the impact of second-wave feminism on her characters’ lives. At the same time, the cultural geography of the inner west suburbs shifts and changes, as Dove and Ellis walk the same streets in Camperdown, Newtown and Ashfield. As Adelaide’s dexterous trick-box plotting opens its compartments, it exposes ideas of generation and agency with an acute, witty and playful eye.

Felicity Plunkett is poetry editor at QUP.

The Women’s Pages

By Debra Adelaide

Picador, 292pp, $29.99