The Biographer’s Lover, by Ruby J Murray

This is a very Melbourne book, although chunks are set in Geelong and bits in Sorrento. A hand-to-mouth writer is hired to write a biography of an uncelebrated deceased artist, Edna Cranmer, by her daughter, who is determined that her mother will receive the recognition she deserves. Other family members are not keen and provide obstructions to the writer digging into the artist’s life. Chapters alternate between the anonymous biographer and her subject. She describes her own life and troubles at the time of writing the biography in her personal chapters, while uncovering the secrets of Edna’s past in the others. Both stories are fascinating, examining the role of female artists and the career obstacles they face; touching on rape; and looking at the impact of war on women. The biographer chapters occasionally leap ahead 20 years to give hints of what develops from that earlier time. This is sometimes jarring and unnecessarily intrusive – do we really need a preview? The strange name of the biographer’s son is never explained and seems to have been chosen in a clumsy attempt to misdirect. Edna and the biographer are both women of their time and the book uses this to show the changing lives of women from the 1930s to the 1990s. Chunks of history and art history are shoehorned into the narrative, which Murray largely gets away with by making it part of a ‘life and times’ biography. It makes the character of Edna totally believable and only occasionally strays towards the didactic.