World Literature, Fiction Subjects, Peoples & Cultures - Fiction

The Home Girls

Name: The Home Girls
Author: Olga Masters
ISBN: 9781922079466

by Olga Masters, Geordie Williamson (Introduction)

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Overview

Olga Masters's short stories, distinguished by their acute observation of human behavior, have been compared with the finest exponents of the form, such as Anton Chekhov. The Home Girls is a collection of acutely candid, witty stories about the dichotomous nature of rural and suburban Australian life.

About the Author, Olga Masters

Olga Masters was born in Pambula, New South Wales, in 1919. She married at twenty-one and had seven children, working part-time as a journalist, leaving her little opportunity to develop her interest in creative writing until she was in her fifties.

In the 1970s Masters wrote a radio play and a stage play, and between 1977 and 1981 she won prizes for her short stories.

Her debut, the short-story collection The Home Girls, won a National Book Council Award in 1983. She wrote two novels and three collections of stories, the third of which was published posthumously. Masters died in 1986.

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of the Australian newspaper, a position he has held since 2008, though his essays and reviews have been appearing in newspapers and magazines here and in the UK for over a decade. In 2011, he won the Pascall Prize for criticism, Australia’s national prize awarded for critical writing. He lives in the Blue Mountains with his family.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Realistic details of poverty and family life in rural Australia animate this collection of 20 concise, direct and often ironic short stories by the late, prize-winning author of Amy's Children. Appearance, clothing and such actions as leaving the breakfast dishes unwashed, stepping on a child in a doorway or kicking the dog reveal the emotional states of characters and the dynamics of family relationships. Masters's focus is often on children, who narrate many of these tales: the control they wield over events in the title story and ``Leaving Home''; their subordination to their parents' needs, seen in ``The Snake and Bad Tom''; their capacity to share parents' traits, as in ``The Sea on Sunday,'' or act as foils to adults, as in ``On the Train.'' In Masters's view, marriage is a fantasy unfulfilled (``A Young Man's Fancy'') or a trade-off (``The Done Thing''), with the children essential as observers, go-betweens and the reasons for carrying on. This collection, originally published in Australia in 1983, speaks in no uncertain terms of the difficulties of women's and children's lives. (June)

Library Journal

Masters died in 1986, having published five award-winning story collections and novels in her native Australia. The Home Girls , her first book of short stories, is her third work published in the United States. Here are 20 vignettes of poverty and misery during the Australian depression featuring hopeless characters described starkly: the fat child and the thin one, shuffled from one foster home to the next; the seven little Wents, who have never seen the sea 15 miles from their home; Maud, Mrs. McMahon, and ``the mother,'' all exhausted by despotic husbands and unending children (Masters herself had seven). Rare flashes of spirit and humor cannot lighten the burden that these stories place on the reader. Recommended for writing students and serious fiction collections.-- Maurice Taylor, Brunswick Cty. Lib., Southport, N.C.