In my late teens, with writing in mind, I began to read with half an eye on the mechanics of plot and style, but for the most part I still read overwhelmingly for pleasure, and with an egoistic need to understand my own place in the world.  Increasingly, this became a need to understand where I stood with girls, and in particular where I stood in relation to a girl I’d fallen catastrophically in love with at the age of 17.  Let’s call her Beatrice. 

Beatrice was a smart, precocious and talented girl who, doubtlessly for sound emotional reasons, preferred to keep me as a friend while she went with other boys.  The effect on my ego was naturally painful, and in my reading I turned to a series of novels about unrequited love, discovering a veritable sub-genre in which a young male protagonist falls under the spell of a compelling and always beautiful woman, often with tragic consequences, usually for the woman.  It would be easy for me now to mock these books, or to subject them to searing feminist critiques, but lost or unrequited love is one of the great themes of literature, and some of the books I read at this time are profound works of art.  Even those of less literary merit continue to mean a lot to me.  The following is a list of the most memorable:

• The Girl in a Swing – Richard Adams
• Diana – R.F. Delderfield
• The Summer of Katya – Trevanian              
• Sophie’s Choice – William Styron
• Justine – Lawrence Durrell
• The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – Giorgio Bassani
• The Magus – John Fowles
• Le Grand Meaulnes – Alain-Fournier

On 9 October 1987 Beatrice was killed in a head-on collision on the New England Highway ten kilometres south of Tamworth.  She was 18 year-old.  To this day I can’t think of her without a gust of grief, and the word I detest most in the English language is “closure”. 

At the time of Beatrice’s death I was already aware of the problematic way in which some of the aforementioned novels effectively silence their female characters with admiration, and when I came to write a first novel, set in Tasmania during the Franklin Dam dispute and inspired by Beatrice, I tried to confront this problem by making it an explicit theme.  I’d like to think that the finished book has some good things going for it, but I was still new to the craft of writing and probably still too close to the events that had inspired the novel.  Maybe I’ll return to it someday.

                                       ”Dante and Beatrice” (1883) by Henry Holiday.