I can’t remember how I first came to hear the music of Vince Jones. Born in Scotland, like my grandmother Alice, he emigrated with his parents to the mining town of Wollongong on the New South Wales coast in the mid-1960s, when he was eleven. Absorbing his father’s jazz record collection, Jones attributes the beginning of his real interest in jazz to hearing Sketches of Spain when he was fourteen. The sound of Miles Davis inspired a working-class white boy to pick up a trumpet and start writing his own songs, a perfect example of D.H. Lawrence’s idea of the ‘blind reaching out for beauty’.
From this tough environment sprang a musician who wrote songs about protecting the environment, respect for women, and the nature of power. My ears had been drenched in jazz standards and the Top 40. The lyrics of the former are full of women treating their man wrong, men abandoning women, misery and loss. On commercial radio, all I heard were songs about sex, featuring banal rhymes: Hold me tight / morning light / feel all right and all that…jazz. The dominant number one singles in 1986 included ‘Venus’ by Bananarama, John Farnham’s ‘You’re the Voice’, Madonna’s ‘Papa Don’t Preach’, and the comic version of ‘Living Doll’ by The Young Ones with Cliff Richard. Jones’s songs, originating from a profound sense of social justice, were a revelation.
I’d started to fantasise about one day writing books and plays. The marks my new English teacher gave me for my essays were so good that I felt for the first time that I could form an original opinion about a text and clearly express it on the page. Despite the increasing intensity of my piano studies—I was preparing for eighth grade, the final level of exams prior to the performance diploma—I really couldn’t see any point in continuing to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, which seemed the inevitable next step. Even if I was good enough, which I doubted, I already knew I didn’t aspire to join an orchestra or teach. The only place I wanted to play the piano was on a stage like in the Basement, as part of a jazz ensemble. But I dismissed the idea as ludicrous: I’d never seen a woman pianist in a live jazz band, and there were no women pianists in the bands in my father’s record collection.
My mother never once encouraged me to aspire to marriage for its own sake. ‘These days, when girls earn money and go where they please, I just don’t know why you would,’ she said repeatedly. Then, as an afterthought: ‘Unless you wanted children, of course.’ I think she had concluded from my limited childhood interest in dolls that I wasn’t overly maternal.
In the mid-1980s, when my mother first began drip-feeding me what I heard as her preference that I remain single, my parents had been married for twenty-five years. In her words I hear ambivalence about the institution of which she remains a member—and the fact of her financial dependence on my father. I hear her saying that while it’s nothing personal, if she had felt she’d had another choice to make, she might well have made it.
As a teenager I thought the point of our education was that we could make our way in the world independently of—or interdependently with—men. Reading Emma, I felt coerced into admiring Mr Knightley because he owned most of the surrounding land. As far as I could tell, all he’d done was inherit it—literally born lucky. Other male characters with admirable traits but fewer resources were passed over like barren ground. It infuriated me that a school whose supposed mission was to encourage young women to live fulfilling and independent lives was feeding us this diet of fantasy. That it was somehow acceptable, even encouraged, for a teenage girl to aim for a rich man rather than become independent. Reading about the social calibrations of bright young women thrown together because of proximity and socio-economics, at the expensive girls-only school my parents struggled to pay for, felt claustrophobic.
I failed to grasp the sexual politics of Austen’s world: the inconvenient truth that in the early decades of the nineteenth century, marriage was the one chance any woman had of making a secure future for herself. Austen’s portrait of small-town English life, her nuanced characterisations of unremarkable people, and her empathy with Emma’s struggle to keep from meddling in other people’s lives and to know her own flaws, passed over my sixteen-year-old head like the elements of the periodic table in Chemistry class.
My naive sympathies lay with the troubled heroines of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, a romantic fictional universe in which working-class women were admired from afar, then from close up, then left for dead, socially and financially speaking. In Hardy’s novels, men often held the power to ruin a woman’s life, but the passion between the characters seemed beautiful and painful and true. In reading, I could indulge my insatiable taste for melancholy, fascinated by the exquisite struggles of fictional others, because I’d not experienced anything like it and was quite certain I’d be clever enough to avoid that sort of thing.
Emma Wedgwood was one of the more naturally talented of the many upper middle-class women studying the piano in Britain in the first decades of the nineteenth century. With a family fortune made in pottery, Emma, like so many of her contemporaries in fiction, was never in the market for an actual job. As a star piano student at the Greville House school, she performed for Prince George of Wales’ consort Mrs Fitzherbert, studied with the virtuoso pianist Ignaz Moscheles, took several lessons with Chopin, and completed her grand tour of Europe when she was sixteen. By the
