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(Penguin Classics)
by Joan Lindsay
Book Reviewed by:A 50th-anniversary edition of the landmark novel about three "gone girls" that inspired the acclaimed 1975 film and an upcoming TV series starring Natalie Dormer.
It was a cloudless summer day in the year 1900. Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of the secluded volcanic outcropping. Farther, higher, until at last they disappeared. They never returned... .
Mysterious and subtly erotic, Picnic at Hanging Rock inspired the iconic 1975 film of the same name by Peter Weir. A beguiling landmark of Australian literature, it stands with Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, and Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides as a masterpiece of intrigue.
Chapter One
Everyone agreed that the day was just right for the picnic to Hanging Rock – a shimmering summer morning warm and still, with cicadas shrilling all through breakfast from the loquat trees outside the diningroom windows and bees murmuring above the pansies bordering the drive. Heavy-headed dahlias flamed and drooped in the immaculate flowerbeds, the well-trimmed lawns steamed under the mounting sun. Already the gardener was watering the hydrangeas still shaded by the kitchen wing at the rear of the College. The boarders at Mrs Appleyard's College for Young Ladies had been up and scanning the bright unclouded sky since six o'clock and were now fluttering about in their holiday muslins like a flock of excited butterflies. Not only was it a Saturday and the long awaited occasion of the annual picnic, but Saint Valentine's Day, traditionally celebrated on the fourteenth of February by the interchange of elaborate cards and favours. All were madly romantic and strictly ...
On a sunny Valentine's Day in rural Australia in 1900, the residents of a girls' boarding school and a few chaperones make their way to a local landmark for a picnic. Known as Hanging Rock, it's a giant stone formation looming over the landscape. While the teachers and most of the girls bask in the sun, four of their classmates wander off to explore. After briefly catching the eye of an aristocratic young British man and his stable groom, the girls begin to climb up the rocks. Soon, they feel dizzy and confused. Only one of the girls makes it down. The others have vanished without a trace. An eerie atmosphere pervades the book, because none of the characters knows what happened to the missing students. The beauty of this novel is that it doesn't provide easy answers. Parts of the mystery are still unexplained at the close of the book. This has led to a rich tradition of fans formulating their own theories...continued
Full Review
(618 words)
(Reviewed by Jillian Bell).
When Joan Lindsay's novel Picnic at Hanging Rock was first released, readers had a pressing question: was it based on a true story? The book's prologue suggests that it might be: "Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important." Adding fuel to the suggestion that the story might be a true one is that the author really did attend a girls' boarding school (as a day student) in Victoria, Australia, in the early twentieth century. And Hanging Rock is a real landmark in the area.
Asked in a 1974 interview about the story'...
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