The Home Girls
Text Classics
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
The Home Girls is a collection of candid, witty stories about rural and suburban life.
Set in the mid-twentieth century, these are tales of ordinary people and domestic life. Masters was, as the Advertiser remarked, 'a natural storyteller'.
Between the publication of The Home Girls, in 1982, and her death, Olga Masters was acclaimed as one of Australia's finest writers. Her short stories, distinguished by their acute observation of human behaviour, drew comparison with the finest exponents of the form, such as Chekhov.
The stories in this collection:
The Home Girls
The Rages of Mrs Torrens
On the Train
Leaving Home
Passenger to Berrigo
The Done Thing
A Rat in the Building
A Dog that Squeaked
A Young Man’s Fancy
The Lang Women
The Snake and Bad Tom
A Poor Winner
Call Me Pinkie
Adams and Barker
Mrs Lister
The Creek Way
The Children Are Coming
A Good Marriage
You’ll Like It There
The Sea on a Sunday
PUBLISHERS 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.
