Holmwood.

Abstract

Holmwood is the novel which constitutes the major work submitted towards my PhD in Creative Writing. It is accompanied in a second volume by an exegesis of the generative and governing notions which I deem to bear on this work. The novel is a contemporary Australian fiction set in the city of Adelaide and focusing on a period of a month or so in the entwined lives of two sisters, Evie and Paula Haggerty, women in their forties. Holmwood grows out of my abiding preoccupation with the acculturation of women worldwide towards a muting and dilution of selfhood and identity, but it is a novel rather than a tract, attempting in particular a psychological verisimilitude and therefore situated largely within the minds of the central characters, who refract and provide a slant on the narrative. Evie and Paula are bound in family bonds and by shared responsibility for Paula' s children. The sisters work in early-child -care and aged-care respectively, their work scenarios providing a context and perspective for their mid-life entanglements with new partners and ongoing struggles with unresolved birth-family and young-adult relationship dilemmas. The close connections of both sisters with adolescents points up their residual attachment to a youth-culture neither has definitively left. I propose the Haggerty sisters as modest heroines of a difficult chapter in history, not alert to all the meanings of their lives, indeed actively repressing many of them, damaged by early life-experiences, but victorious, to a great degree, against the challenges of their adult lives. I hope this is an amusing and insightful novel about women of a certain age. It is squarely aimed at an identifiable market, thirty-plus women readers bored with 'chick lit'.