Byron wrote to Murray, his publisher, that:

… all reading, either praise or . . . censure of myself has done me harm – when I was in Switzerland I was out of the way of hearing either – AND HOW I WROTE THERE!

But Byron was very willing to write about himself, not only in his poems and journals but in twelve volumes of letters. He, clearly, often wrote a self-portrait.  

It is flattering to be asked to follow this precedent established long before, and continued long after Byron’s time. But what should go into a self-portrait if it is to hold a reader’s attention, let alone convey something of understanding?

Perhaps a writer’s self-portrait should concentrate on those aspects of life which appear to influence the writing.

Looking over my own work, I have been surprised to find how important the theme of exile is.

It is not given to the child either to know or to understand the happiness or the sadness of the parent. Clytemnestra speaks of this to her daughter, Electra, when she arrives at the dirty hut where the banished Electra lives:

… I agree, one should not speak
Bitterly. But when people judge someone, they ought
to learn the facts, and then hate, if they’ve reason to
And if they find no reason, then they should not hate.

My mother and father were married in Vienna soon after the Great War, which ended in defeat and destruction of the Hapsburg Empire. Vienna was no longer the administrative centre of a large empire. Filled with almost destitute inhabitants, it became an over-large capital of a small nation. My grandfather, who had been a general in the Imperial Army, belonged now to that large class whose reason for existence disappeared with the Emperor.

It is not surprising that my mother saw in the young Englishman not merely an acceptable husband, but a way back to prosperity and social status. An understandable, but disastrous error. My mother found herself in an England which was not made up of castles and country estates but which was urban, industrial, dirty, and mean – an England and a people which were beyond her understanding. She responded to her new surrounding with imitation and contempt. My father must have made great efforts to compensate.

‘Your mother has such pretty arms,’ he often said. He defended her from the world and from herself. Perhaps my vicarious experience of homesickness and exile starts – without any knowledge or understanding – from my early memories of this incomprehensible unhappiness.

My mother and father always spoke German together, and I spoke German until I was six, when I started school, and then, surrendering to my surroundings, I stopped speaking German.

My father was an exile of a different kind. During the Great War, he suffered brutal imprisonment as a conscientious objector. His father – my other grandfather – disowned him because of his beliefs, and the disgrace of his imprisonment. He went to Vienna as a relief worker with the Quakers. His position in his father’s house was not improved by his bringing back – as a bride – an impoverished aristocrat from an enemy country. When speaking of this once in later years, he was not bitter about his father, but he did say that he felt for many years, because of the experience, he had been ‘warped’. In an embarrassed way he was, at the time, trying to make some sort of explanation and apology to me.

When I was a child we lived in a neighbourhood where foreigners were regarded with curiosity, if not outright distrust. Opinions were those of George Eliot’s villagers:

In that far-off time superstition clung easily round every person or thing that was at all unwonted. .. and how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother?

‘My mam’s bakin’ yo’ a cake,’ a little boy I played with said, ‘‘er says yor mam can’t cook.’ The cake was never delivered, but it’s the thought that counts.

My father was a science teacher. In him were contained all the conflicts between science, human effort, and feeling and what is called, in a lump, religion. Thinking that children lost their innocence at school, he took my sister and me away from school. I was eight years old then and my sister was seven. My father and mother – and a rapid succession of French and German governesses – provided what education we received. Perhaps we learned most from the BBC school programs. Images sprang at once from quality and tone of voice, whether the voice was describing the plight of the Flying Dutchman, the remarks made in Parliament or the necessity of taking off one’s vest every night to shake out the germs gathered during the day.

Children who do not go to school and whose family speak a foreign language are exiles in their own street. Like all lonely children, we retreated into fantasy and imagination. The people who lived in our dolls’ houses are still alive. One of my characters, Weekly, in The Newspaper of Claremont Street, though I did not realise this for some time, comes, in part, from the tiny, well cleaned kitchen of my sister’s dolls’ house. On bus and train journeys we drew pencil people in what we called Day Books and we shouted their dialogue and their actions across the other passengers to one another. This game lasted for years; perhaps in our letter writing we still continue it. It is continued on bits of paper, in solitude, at my own table now.

My mother never allowed us to have long hair. Some may recall the haircut called a shingle. An old lady, passing the dusty hedge in front of our house, paused to ask us;

‘Are you two girls or boys?’

‘I’m Monica Elizabeth,’ I explained, ‘she’s Madelaine Winifred. We’re boys.’

At the age of eleven I was sent with my father’s reluctant permission to a Quaker boarding school in rural Oxfordshire. Being brought up as a Quaker is not the same as being a Quaker by Birth. I was an exile on the edge of the Birth Right Quakers. Unaccustomed to being with other children and missing the smell of the bone and glue factory and the heave and roar of the blast furnaces I cried. Between autumn-berried hedge rows I cried in the middle of a road which seemed to be leading nowhere. Brown, ploughed fields sloped in all directions, there were no houses, shops or trams and there were no people, only the rook gathering, unconcerned, in the leafless trees at the side of an empty life-less barn.

The pain of homesickness has to be cured in some way. I wrote stories, mainly about rabbits which were rather like people I knew, and sent them home to my sister. I made up stories to tell in the dormitory at night. I made for myself a picture of a longed for cosy home life which never existed but which, in thought, comforted.

Another edge of exile; the daughter of a teacher nursing in a hospital at a time when probationer nurses needed a well-to-do background in order to survive on twenty eight shillings a month and frugal ‘keep’. As with the Quakers there was the feeling of being excluded from an establishment and its members. This time it was a layer of society called county in which tweeds and twin sets and pearls were not just a joke.

Perhaps the writer, in writing, overcomes and accepts feelings of exclusion.

‘Are these tomatoes English?’ I asked a Scottish greengrocer.

‘Madam! They are Scotch!’ and I discovered at once that to move to Scotland was to move to another country.

Being a stranger is not to reject one’s environment. I store the images of coal mines, brickworks and slag heaps. I can never forget the smooth hills of the Cotswolds and the wet tough grass and heather of the Scottish moors. I store too the regional sounds of voices, accents and dialect and the contemporary idiom of every place and of every decade.

Perhaps, for me, encountering and accepting strange territory is a necessary part of learning to be a writer.

I came to Western Australia in the middle of my life. I realise that the freshness of my observation can distort as well as illuminate. The impact of the new country does not obliterate the previous one but sharpens memory, thought and feeling thus providing a contrasting theme or setting.

I am always being asked, ‘do you write from your own experience?’ Obviously any author must write from experience, but if the question means do I write accounts of people I have known or of a sequence of events I have witnessed the answer is decidedly ‘no’.

The experience from which I write is created by things seen or heard or read about or imagined. I use small fragments, hints, suggestions of experience. The landscape of my writing is not to be found clearly on any map. A particular aspect of a tree or a paddock at a particular moment may be used. All my life since the earnest, hopeful prayers written in my diaries during the first real miseries of boarding school life I have kept journals in which I write about people and places; dwelling on, perhaps, some detail of human effort or the way in which a tree might change in the changing light of an afternoon.

The character of Miss Hailey in the novel Mr Scobie’s Riddle is based on the sight of a woman in an unusual straw hat. That is all I noticed about her as I passed her in the street. But as I passed I imagined how pleased she would be to be able to tell someone the way.

A picture of the sea or even the sharp rise from the coastal plain which is characteristic of the southern part of Western Australia, as well as many other regions, is based on something seen but not seen in a sharply defined geographical location.

I explain, when asked, that my stories start with a character and not with a plot but I know that this distinction is unreal. Perhaps I start with a feeling for a character and then try to develop this in a number of situations. Most of these situations will never be related in the final work. In any writing it is only what is actually written that counts but all these explor­atory studies contribute to the character which is finally offered. I can use material only when it can be imaginatively transformed. Some personal experience, the nursing of soldiers sent back from Europe during the war, had to be accepted but I have not yet been able to write from this experience.

Some years ago I was offered teaching work at the Western Australian Institute of Technology and at the Fremantle Arts Centre as well as Workshops in the country districts of Western Australia. I think that teaching helps my writing, certainly it does not hamper it. I have never ventured into the principles of criticism. With my students I look at a text and try to make clear what the writer is trying to achieve and how this achievement is brought about. This is of great value to me and I hope it is of value to my students.

I read a great deal. I realise that however much time I spend in reading I shall not be able to read as much as I would like to. It is necessary to distinguish between writers who have made a great impression on me and those who may have influenced my writing. I often reread the Elective Affinities and Rasselas but I do not imagine that I write in any way like Goethe or Johnson. I suppose both have shown me ways of using words and ways of looking at people. This may be all that is meant by a writer’s influence on another writer.

I am unable to name a book which has been a model for me. I read the same stories, plays and novels over and over again. When I am writing I find I have to avoid reading some of the ‘strong’ writers, Henry James and Patrick White, for example, because they intrude with the power of their words.

In times when I am unable to write I reread a wide range of authors, Cervantes, Chekhov, Ibsen, James, Hardy, Thomas Mann, E.M. Forster, and I read as many contemporary poets and fiction writers. Apart from the pleasure of reading, I find it is better to read than to simply fret in despair about being unable to write.

I have to disagree with the often made remark that the short story is unpopular. Before writing or while I am writing a story I never consider whether it will be published or not, whether it will be saleable or not. I am drawn towards short stories both in reading and in writing and I continued to write them during years when I was not being published. I would have gone on writing even if nothing was published.

V.S. Pritchett in his preface to his Collected Stories has written about the short story:

… thousands of addicts still delight in it, because it is above all memorable and is not simply read, but re-read again and again. It is the glancing form of fiction that seems to be right for the nervousness and the restlessness of contemporary life.

The same can be said of the short novel as it is written at the present time.