Bulletin

Issue: July/August 2007

News

Her life in her hands…

Dr Rowley with Professor Johnson,
left, and ABR editor, Peter Rose.

Taking her own life in her hands – on the topic ‘The Ups, the Downs: My Life as a Biographer’ – the distinguished expatriate author delivered this year’s Australian Book Review / La Trobe University Annual Lecture.

La Trobe is a major sponsor of the ABR and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Paul Johnson, co-hosted this year’s lecture, the fifth in a series which previously has featured Clive James, Peter Goldsworthy and Peter Porter.

Dr Rowley’s books include Christina Stead: A Biography, Richard Wright: The Life and Times and Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Brought up in England and Australia, Dr Rowley now lives in New York and Paris. Her lecture dealt with many challenges facing biographers.

She said when working on Wright – whom she described as a ‘viscerally powerful writer’ who made her feel what it was like to be a black boy growing up poor in segregated Mississippi in the 1910s’ – there were ‘days when the only white person I would see was myself, in the mirror. As it turned out, it was a real advantage to be an outsider. My accent gave me license to ask questions I could not have asked if I had been a white American.’

To write about Sartre and Beauvoir, she moved to Paris. Again, it was an advantage to be an outsider.

‘The Parisian intellectual world consists of cliques, who in their loyalties and hatreds are not unlike the gangs in West Side Story,’ Dr Rowley said. ‘As a foreigner, I felt less bound by what I could and could not say about this iconic French couple.’

The full text of the lecture appears in the July-August issue of the ABR.