Joan Lindsay is a celebrated Australian author. Born in 1896, Linsday grew up in St Kilda East, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. She has said her childhood was a happy and quiet one. She received early encouragement from her family to pursue the arts and showed promise as both a writer and painter. At the age of thirteen, she was sent away to Clyde Girls' Grammar School, a boarding school. There, she focused on visual art and planned to become an architect. She was regarded as an excellent student. She went on to attend the National Gallery of Victoria Art School for college. In school, she met Daryl Lindsay, a painter whom she later married in 1922.
In 1930, Lindsay published her first book, a travel satire titled Through Darkest Pondelayo. The book was Lindsay's attempt to mock the many popular travel books of her time. In 1962, she published her semi-autobiographical novel, Time Without Clocks, about the early years of her marriage to Daryl. Lindsay's critical breakthrough occurred in 1967, with her publication of Picnic at Hanging Rock, a historical novel depicting the strange disappearance of several boarding school girls and their teacher at Hanging Rock. The book was a major critical and commercial success, receiving positive comparison to the work of E.M. Forster and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The book was subsequently adapted into a successful film, directed by Peter Weir, in 1975. It was also reissued by Penguin in the same year. Following a severe car accident in 1969 and Daryl's death in 1976, Lindsay slowed her work output in later years and focused primarily on curating art exhibits. Her final publication, Syd Sixpence (1982), was a children's book about a coin that comes to life and sees the ocean floor. Lindsay died of stomach cancer in 1984.
Picnic at Hanging Rock is a novel by Australian author Joan Lindsay. Set in 1900, the book tells the story of a group of young women attending Appleyard College, an Australian boarding school in Macedon, Victoria. It details their mysterious...
