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The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer by Edwina Preston

by
December 2012–January 2013, no. 347

The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer by Edwina Preston

University of Queensland Press, $29.95 pb, 336 pp, 9780702249211

The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer by Edwina Preston

by
December 2012–January 2013, no. 347

The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer is a novel that manages to be absolutely itself, with a wholly idiosyncratic voice, while at the same time acting as a veritable echo chamber of earlier writers. The first page, with its lofty insistence about what ‘should not surprise the world’ in the behaviour of a young woman with the surname Ward, immediately calls to mind Mansfield Park, and the Austen echo is redoubled by the fact that her first name is Marianne. However, Preston’s narrator proceeds to address her readers with a confidence she might have learned from Anthony Trollope, while elsewhere providing information in bulleted lists, a trick Laurence Sterne would probably have found useful had he been writing a couple of centuries later.

Gillian Dooley reviews 'The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer' by Edwina Preston

The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer

by Edwina Preston

University of Queensland Press, $29.95 pb, 336 pp, 9780702249211

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