Jennifer Woodhouse

Dr. Ann-Marie Priest’s virtuosic biography of Australian poet, librettist and essayist Gwen Harwood (1920-1995) effervesces with the energy, wit and talent, and also the contradictions and complexity, of its mercurial, volatile, polyphonic subject. In tracing the intricate, intimate contours of Harwood’s inner life and art, as well as documenting the details of her quotidian circumstances, the biography is a magisterial achievement, with all the hallmarks of the distinguished biographer’s art: accuracy, veracity, a writing style that captivates the reader with its ability to evoke its subject; an unwavering fidelity to meticulous scholarship that never overwhelms the reader’s unerring sense of the life being portrayed. Dr Priest's study of Gwen Harwood's life is so accomplished, so scrupulously attentive to nuance and detail in evoking Harwood's tumultuous personal life and phenomenal talent, and so compelling in the fluency and elegance of its evocative prose, that it deserves to become a classic of the genre.

I couldn't put this book down. As a former literary scholar whose research topic involved the poets of Russia in the Silver Age (the first two decades of the 20th century), I was fascinated by the accuracy of the detail in this novel, the world it recreated in the context of the Imperial Russian Ballet, the intimate feeling for that world and the characters, actual and fictional, whose milieu it was, and the fine tuning in depicting the lives and relationships at the centre of the drama. The sensory impressions and atmospheric effects the writing evokes transport the reader to the place and time of the story, and the nuanced physicality a writer who is also a dancer brings to her subjects enables them to live and to breathe, to love and to dance in the theatre of the reader's imagination. Having spent some time as a student in St Petersburg (then Leningrad), I appreciate how convincingly the author has portrayed her characters and their world. Her passion for her subject and her talent as a storyteller, enriched by her training as a dancer and painstaking research, make reading this novel an enthralling and memorable experience.