AustLit

'Sylvia Martin's moving biography tracks the life of Aileen Palmer and provides great insight into the lives of the Palmer family. Aileen was the elder daughter of Nettie and Vance Palmer, leading figures in Australian literary and intellectual circles between the wars. Aileen's younger sister, Helen, in her own right, became a distinguished Australian writer and activist in left wing politics. With great sensitivity and deftness, Martin lays out the preoccupations of Aileen and her family and the patterns that formatted their relations: between parents and children, and sister to sister. Martin also tracks, in Aileen's later years, the increasing concern of Vance and Nettie with their daughter's mental illness and, after Vance's death, the more and more fraught nature of the contact between Aileen and her mother.' (Introduction)