The Little Company

Eleanor Dark

Jan. 2012 · Allen & Unwin

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It is 1941 and the storm clouds of war gather over Australia. In the mountains outside Sydney the Massey family are reunited by their father's death. Gilbert is a successful novelist, struggling with writer's block in middle age. A socialist and intellectual, he shares his political understanding - and fears - with his sister Marty and Marxist brother Nick. But he is locked in an unhappy marriage with a woman of little imagination and obsessive respectability, and their daughters, Prue and Virginia, are as incompatible as their parents.

With the bombing of Pearl Harbor, war becomes a reality. As Gilbert and his family are overtaken by the forces of history they must come to terms with their personal and public failures, and watch as the new generation inevitably mirrors the contradictions and turmoil of the old.

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Eleanor Dark was born in 1901 and educated in Sydney. She is one of Australia's most highly regarded writers of the 1930s and '40s.

Dark began writing in her childhood and contributed verse, short stories and articles to various magazines. Her first novel, Slow Dawning, was published in 1932. A further nine novels followed: Prelude to Christopher (1934), Return to Coolami (1936), Sun Across the Sky (1937), Waterway (1938), The Little Company (1945), Lantana Lane (1959), and the trilogy of historical novels The Timeless Land (1941), Storm of Time (1948) and No Barrier (1953).

Dark also wrote short fiction, essays, radio scripts and poetry. She was married to Eric Dark, a medical doctor and leftist social thinker. She died in 1985, and Varuna, her house in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, is now a writers' centre.