AustLit

'Brace yourself : Amy Witting throws her first punch hard, fast and almost immediatly.

At the moment which became history, Ella Ferguson was wearing nightgown, dressing gown and slippers...

Her husband, Professor Bernard Ferguson MB, FRCS, was knotting his tie. That was why she was watching him. For thirty-two years she had taken pleasure in watching him knot his tie, handling the rich, dark silk, sliding the tightening loop under his shirt collar, where it settled into a firm, precisley placed knot. He was still extremely handsome, having stiffened more in mind than in body, but that movement recreated for her the beautiful,earnest young man she had married. buying ties for him, which seemed such a sedate occupation, was for her what the young people called a turn-on.

And then, halfway down page two of  A Change in the Lighting, Witting floors-unmoors- her main character entirely...'

(Introduction)

'This article examines ways in which the fiction of the acclaimed Australian writer Amy Witting, dubbed Australia’s Chekov and whom Helen Garner acknowledged as her ‘literary mother,’ interrogates the disempowerment of women in the domestic sphere, asserting that the home is a contested space and conflicted place for women. Witting subverts the notion that a ‘woman’s place is in the home’ by demonstrating that many

women are actually displaced and dispossessed in the inhibiting domestic spaces that are their ‘homes.’ In her fiction, women are isolated and excluded because of gender inequity

in regard to women’s rights and duties in the domestic sphere. Women are also marginalised in regard to inadequate financial rewards for domestic productivity and are affected by circumstances underpinned by discourses of poverty, class conflict and domestic violence. Witting asserts that the disempowerment of women in the home often leads to women appropriating masculinist attitudes and behaviours of oppression towards other women less powerful than themselves. In this article, these concepts are explored with close reference to five of Witting’s novels and interviews conducted with the author.' (Author's abstract)