[WXV]≫ PDF A Fringe of Leaves Penguin TwentiethCentury Classics Patrick White 9780140186109 Books

A Fringe of Leaves Penguin TwentiethCentury Classics Patrick White 9780140186109 Books

Download As PDF : A Fringe of Leaves Penguin TwentiethCentury Classics Patrick White 9780140186109 Books

A Fringe of Leaves Penguin TwentiethCentury Classics Patrick White 9780140186109 Books

Fascinating story of a social and cultural transformation of Ellen Gluyas, simple self-conscious girl of modest rural background, to the high-class Lady Roxburgh, Ellen's high moral qualities and an almost incredible adaptability to the most brutal conditions promote her to a true woman-hero.


Tags : A Fringe of Leaves (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) [Patrick White] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Returning to England in 1840, the Bristol Maid is shipwrecked on the Queensland Coast and Mrs Roxburgh is taken prisoner by a tribe of Aborigines. In the course of her escape,Patrick White,A Fringe of Leaves (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics),Penguin Classics,0140186107,Literary,Fiction,Fiction General,Fiction Literary,Modern fiction,Literature: Classics

A Fringe of Leaves Penguin TwentiethCentury Classics Patrick White 9780140186109 Books Reviews

There is a touch of the chaos in Fringe of Leaves. It is not boring and it is one of White's better novels. It has a good story and I will not reveal the plot beyond what the publisher reveals on the book jacket.

I have read three of White's novels the present work, the Tree of Man, and Voss. The present novel, is more complex than Voss, and unlike Voss here the author manages to breath some life into the characters. It has a good plot that reminds one a bit of Jane Eyre, but with quite a different setting. It is set in England in the middle of the 19th century. It is about a young woman from Cornwall who marries a wealthy gentleman. They go to Australia and are caught in a ship wreck off the coast of Queensland after visiting the husband's brother in Tasmania.

White uses stream of consciousness in a mild form which seems a bit novel after reading Voss. But the thing that grabs your attention is his use of structure. He introduces the protagonist, Ellen, by having two ladies describe her for about 20 pages. The two women ride in a horse drawn carriage chatting about Ellen. You, as the reader, realize that White will be creative in what will follow in the story.

After that we move the present scene in the story. But Ellen has these flashbacks to fill in the story of her life over most of the first half.

Patrick White gained fame as the Australian Nobel prize winner in literature and as a person with a prickly or difficult personality. He was educated at Cambridge but settled and wrote in Australia after World War II. He wrote about a dozen novels and a biography.

This is a good novel and it deserves 5 stars. After a dozen pages or so it becomes clear to the reader why White is famous he has an unusual style and he is a gifted writer. There is no question about his writing ability. We see great writing ability in Voss and that skill is present in The Tree of Man and in the present novel.

Overall, I thought it was a good book and an interesting read and an interesting book to read if you are interested in the works of Patrick White.
Mrs Roxburgh and her husband set sail for England from Austrailia. The Bristol Maid is shipwrecked and she is taken prisoner by cannibilistic aborigines...
On one level this is a first rate adventure story of love, betrayal, capture and escape. But such is the power of Patrick White-and as with his other great works-this is also a brilliant exploration of man-the beast-and the nature he is bound by. White appals the reader with the manner in which the aboriginals enslave and treat Ellen Roxburgh,but deftly illustrates that no matter what cultural angle we take or live by,they are all just a veneer over our true savage selves. If the aboriginal customs and rites that guide their lives shock civilized sensibilities,what so about civilization that has enslaved men and women in a brutal penal colony,stringing up the bodies of captured bolters 'as a warning to the rest'?. Yes its covered up with aesthetics and manners,but it is still as savage as any 'primitive' culture. This is a truly great piece of work.
White writes in meticulous detail, so vivid that it conjures pictures in the mind that forever will remind you of the story.
It is impossible to say what serves as Whites masterpiece as his great novels-'Voss' 'Tree of Man' 'Riders in the Chariot' 'Solid Mandala' and 'A Fringe of Leaves' are all so superbly of a high standard that maybe only his collected works in one volume could be considered as such. A true nobel writer.
What riper themes for a 'historical' novel? Patrick White's "A Fringe of Leaves" is exactly that, a historical romance set in Australia in the 1830s, when much of the country was as yet unconquered by its English and Irish settlers, a good number of whom were convicts. Fringe was first published in 1976, but in many ways it reads as a late-Victorian novel. There's a tremendous amount of Thomas Hardy about it, in subject matter, in narrative structure, and in its bitter-to-bittersweet outlook on humankind. The central tale of romance, between a strong-bodied young woman and a bookish older man, has echoes of George Eliot's Middlemarch -- intentional, I think -- and the survival tale that emerges as the second half of the novel, after a shipwreck, reminds me inexorably of Joseph Conrad. Then, when the heroine is 'adopted' unwillingly into non-European culture, I can't help thinking of E. M. Forster's "Passage to India". Forster's and White's uneasy attitudes toward erotic encounters are of a kind.

But Patrick White was his own man as a writer, and had his own very recognizable narrative voice. He mixed crisply evocative scenic descriptions with almost parenthetical wit and irony. His persistent tone of surly superciliousness toward his own characters,his creatures of imagination, may require a breaking-in period for many readers. I was strongly 'put off' by it when I read "Voss", my first encounter with White. However, in "Fringe of Leaves" the author created a compelling female character, Ellen Roxburgh, of more persuasive reality than almost any other heroine in fiction portrayed by authors of any gender persuasion. Mrs. Roxburgh is the survivor, and the horrors she survives would seem impossible except that they are utterly true to history, very similar to the accounts of the sufferings of the real-life American Captain James Riley, a shipwreck castaway enslaved by Bedouins in the Sahara in the early 1800s.

As I've already suggested, this is a novel with two halves -- the first a story of love and guilt among the Anglophone settlers, and the second a grueling narrative of captivity and escape -- but the two halves are jointed together masterfully by a shipwreck scene worthy of Conrad or Melville. And then there's an ending... the most unexpected, puzzling, ironic ending/non-ending one could ask for, the kind of ending that first makes you want to heave the book into the surf but then compels you to acknowledge it as the only thing plausible.

This is a "page-turner", whatever other impression of difficult earnestness I may have suggested. It would be possible, for a less compulsively analytic reader, to 'go with the flow' of passions and pangs, and to read "A Fringe of Leaves" as a flaming romance. Whatever sort of reader you are, give it a shot! It's perhaps the best 19th Century novel written in our lifetimes.
I love the way PW with the help of very few words describes a person, a relationship and a situation.
Fascinating story of a social and cultural transformation of Ellen Gluyas, simple self-conscious girl of modest rural background, to the high-class Lady Roxburgh, Ellen's high moral qualities and an almost incredible adaptability to the most brutal conditions promote her to a true woman-hero.