Book description
Happy Valley is Patrick White's first novel. It was published
by George C. Harrap in London in 1939 when White was twenty-seven. It
was praised by, among others, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen, and
won the Australian Literature Gold Medal in 1941, but, fearing that he
had libelled one of the families portrayed in the novel, White did not
allow the novel to be republished in English in his lifetime.
Happy Valley is a place of dreams and secrets, of snow and ice and
wind. In this remote little town, perched in its landscape of desolate
beauty, everybody has a story to tell about loss and longing and
loneliness, about their passion to escape. I must get away, thinks Dr
Oliver Halliday, thinks Alys Browne, thinks Sidney Furlow. But Happy
Valley is not a place that can be easily left, and White's vivid
characters, with their distinctive voices, move bit by bit towards
sorrow and acceptance.
Happy Valley is the missing piece in the extraordinary jigsaw
of Patrick White's work.
Patrick White was born in England in 1912. His Australian parents
took him home when he was six months old but educated him in England
at Cheltenham College and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in
London, where Happy Valley was published to some acclaim in
1939. After serving in the RAF during the Second World War he returned
to Australia with his partner, Manoly Lascaris. The novels, short
stories and plays that followed The Tree of Man in 1956 made
White a considerable figure in world literature. He was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The Hanging Garden, an
unfinished novel he put aside in 1981, was found among his papers
after his death in 1990 and published by Cape in 2012.
Introduction by Peter Craven.
