Seeking a Life in the Literary Position: The Writing of Charmian Clift

Charmian Clift (1923-1969) is an Australian novelist and essayist. In the 1950s and 1960s Clift and her husband George Johnston became famous nationally and internationally as Australia's golden couple, a version of America's Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Clift and Johnston lived in the Greek islands during the 1950s. Clift set some of her fiction and non-fiction on Hydra where she and her husband were at the centre of a sometimes volatile expatriate community. Clift's fiction and essays always attracted a wide readership. Four novels written in the 50s and 60s were published internationally and her weekly essays, written on her return to Sydney, Australia, have been published in edited collections. Seeking a Life in the Literary Position: The Writing of Charmian Clift is a critical account of her published and unpublished work and informs contemporary explorations of Clift's life and writing.