Born: 12 November 1941, Australia
Died: 18 June 2006
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Australian novelist Madeleine St John “was a late-blooming writer who lived on an emotional rollercoaster between fury and despair.” Her debut novel, 1993’s The Women in Black (later adapted into a film, a musical, and a television series as Ladies in Black), is a nostalgic look at the 1950s through the lens of women working in a Sydney department store. The book addresses marriage difficulties, the experiences of European refugees, and cultural influences of the time. As a friend recounted, “She started writing, she told me, as she was working in a bookshop in London and thought ‘I can write better than most of the people we’re selling.’”
With the success of The Women in Black, St John published three more novels: A Pure Clear Light (1996), The Essence of the Thing (1997,) and A Stairway to Paradise (1999), all set in London and “sharply observant of social class and fractured relationships,” according to the Sydney Morning Herald. The Essence of the Thing was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize. Unfortunately, she never finished her fifth novel. A lifelong smoker, she was debilitated by emphysema and passed away in 2006. She wouldn’t live to see the Ladies in Black adaptations that brought her work to a new generation of audiences in the 2010s and 2020s. Yet even with her own work, St John observed, “We won’t know for a hundred years the truth about whether it’s any good. It’s one of the things about literature; you just can’t tell until you’re dead.”