The Women in Black

Introduction by Bruce Beresford

At the very end of the Ladies’ Frocks Departments, past Cocktail Frocks, there was something very special, something quite, quite wonderful; but it wasn’t for everybody: that was the point. Because there, at the very end, there was a lovely arch, on which was written in curly letters Model Gowns.

Written by a superb novelist of contemporary manners, The Women in Black is a fairytale which illuminates the extraordinariness of ordinary lives. The women in black are run off their feet, what with the Christmas rush and the summer sales that follow. But it’s Sydney in the 1950s, and there’s still just enough time left on a hot and frantic day to dream and scheme…

By the time the last marked-down frock has been sold, most of the staff of the Ladies’ Cocktail section at F. G. Goode’s have been launched into slightly different careers. With the lightest touch and the most tender of comic instincts, Madeleine St John conjures a vanished summer of innocence. The Women in Black is a great novel, a lost Australian classic.

www.textclassics.com.au

Praise for The Women in Black:

‘An exceptional writer. Those of us who knew her at Sydney University back in the late 1950s are still trying to forgive ourselves that we never guessed what she would become.’

Clive James

‘Seductive, hilarious, brilliantly observed, this novel shimmers with wit and tenderness.’

Helen Garner

‘A major minor masterpiece, a witty and poignant snapshot of Sydney the year before yesterday.’

Barry Humphries

‘A knockout — ironic, sharp, alive, and then you’re stopped in your tracks by the warmth of her insights.’

Joan London

‘A little gem…shot through with old-fashioned innocence and sly humour.’

Vogue

‘A highly sophisticated work, full of funny, sharp and subtle observations…a small masterpiece.’

Sunday Times (UK)

‘It is to be hoped that St John, who is woefully undervalued here, will at last be recognised as the best novelist we never had.

St John’s representation of department store life…is remarkably precise in its detail. But it is the women in black who rivet our attention…What is brilliant is the ease with which St John conjures a range of characters and social settings. A procession of brief scenes passes swiftly yet leaves an array of indelible impressions…St John owes much to her gift for dialogue , which is unrivalled…Dialogue is the motor that carries her narrative forward…and it is this, even more than her genius for comedy, which creates the impression of the lightness and economy characteristic of her work.

Yet her scintillating play is founded on seriousness. St John…leaves us in no doubt that her heroine’s future happiness will depend on more than a man and a model gown. Lisa is thus an emblematic figure: a girl who marks the beginning of the shift from feminine mystique to feminist consciousness. … we glimpse the effect of post-war European immigration on a still-provincial Australia…a subject famously dissected in Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot. His mode is magisterial and tragic, St John’s glancing and optimistic; they offer equally forceful visions of the experiment of modern Australia.

…the pleasure Australian readers take…is necessarily tinged with regret, for we are left forever wondering what St John might have showed us about ourselves, if she had stayed.

Michelle de Kretser, Age

’There is something special about…The Women in Black. St John’s tone is…a joy: brisk, perfectly managed and, in its disdain for clutter, oddly life-affirming. She casts an airy spell with the deftness of her prose, which moves gracefully, swiftly and with perfect manners…[St John] conjures a Sydney on the cusp of modern promise; a place where her characters can meet the future with a bright face and step out of the past like an old dress, where limits can be lightly shaken off.’

Delia Falconer, Australian