The Importance of Being Eve Langley

Second Hand

Excellent Condition

This long-awaited and carefully researched biography of Eve Langley by Joy L. Thwaite is an engrossing account of an Australian writer's life dogged constantly by the limitations of conventional ideas and sexual roles.

Langley's eventual collapse was due to her despair and obsession with the very notion of gender as well as with the notion of passing time. This is the remarkable story of her years of wandering as a child; of her crop-picking days when she and her sister dressed as, and behaved as, boys; of her doomed marriage; of her incessant, feverish, compulsive writing; of her committal to a mental institution for seven years, of her assumption, by deed poll, of the name Oscar Wilde; and of her final, lonely days living in the three-roomed hut at Katoomba...

Throughout it all, Joy L. Thwaite chronicles Eve Langley's progressive disintegration as sensitively and as thoroughly as she does Langley's early achievements and triumphs.