Life Class: The Education of a Biographer

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Melbourne University Press, 2007 - Biography & Autobiography - 290 pages
Brenda Niall is one of Australia's foremost biographers, the author of four award-winning winning studies including The Boyds: A Family Biography. In Life Class: The Education of a Biographer she describes her own life-journey, from childhood in the Melbourne suburb of Kew; her convent education; her brilliantly promising university studies cut short by family tragedy. Her first job, as editor of B.A. Santamaria's Catholic Action journal Rural Life, brought her suddenly and unexpectedly close to the dramatic events of 1954 when ALP leader Dr Evatt attacked Santamaria's Movement and the Australian Labor Party split disastrously. Later, her interviews at Raheen, Kew, with 95-year-old Daniel Mannix, for Santamaria's biography of the Archbishop, were her introduction to life-writing. She resumed her academic career at ANU and at Monash University in the thriving intellectual climate of the 1960s. Niall also retraces her literary footsteps to discuss the pleasures of biographical discovery and the pitfalls - technical, personal and moral - of entering other people's lives. Her biographical adventures include travels in England, Scotland and Italy, Austria and Hungary as well as scenes closer to home - in Melbourne, the Mornington Peninsula, Sydney and the Shoalhaven region of NSW. Niall's eventful, rich and creative life will fascinate her many confirmed fans and appeal to the growing number of readers interested in life writing. It is a valuable addition to the well-established tradition of eminent literary biographers writing about their craft.

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Contents

On Kew Hill
3
First Lessons
32
Interviewing the Archbishop
62
Copyright

6 other sections not shown

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About the author (2007)

Brenda Niall is an Australian author, literary critic and journalist, born in 1930. She has degrees from the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University and Monash University. In 2004 she was awarded the Order of Australia for 'services to Australian literature, as an academic, biographer and literary critic'. Her first book was the biography, Martin Boyd (1974). Her later work includes Life Class, The Riddle of Father Hackett: a life in Ireland and Australia, True North: the story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack and Mannix, for which she won the 2016 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and the 2016 National Biography Award, presented by the State Library of New South Wales.

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