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Eve and Steve

Distinguishing fiction from biography
by
October 2021, no. 436

Eve Langley and The Pea Pickers by Helen Vines

Monash University Publishing $34.95 pb, 389 pp

Eve and Steve

Distinguishing fiction from biography
by
October 2021, no. 436
Eve Langley in a 1954 publicity photograph for White Topee. (June Lilian Langley papers, State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS 3898, Eve and June Langley pictorial material, ca 1860–ca 1979).
Eve Langley in a 1954 publicity photograph for White Topee. (June Lilian Langley papers, State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS 3898, Eve and June Langley pictorial material, ca 1860–ca 1979).

In 1942, The Pea Pickers was published by Angus & Robertson in Sydney, garnering high praise for its freshness and poetic invention. A picaresque tale of two sisters who, dressed as boys, earn their living picking seasonal crops in Gippsland in the late 1920s, it impressed Douglas Stewart, literary editor of the Bulletin, with its ‘love of Australian earth and Australian people and skill in painting them’. The author, Eve Langley, was at that time incarcerated in the Auckland Mental Hospital, where she would remain for the next seven years, isolated from her estranged husband and three young children, and from her mother and sister, who were also in New Zealand.

Susan Sheridan reviews 'Eve Langley and The Pea Pickers' by Helen Vines

Eve Langley and The Pea Pickers

by Helen Vines

Monash University Publishing $34.95 pb, 389 pp

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