It was made into a remarkable film in 1969 – here is a trailer for it.
A beautiful, haunting novel from the
award-winning
Ursula Dubosarsky
The Getting of Wisdom | The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie | The Lost Estate | A Passage to India
Thucydides | Freud | The Bible
The Getting of Wisdom is a classic Australian novel by Henry Handel Richardson (1870–1946), the pen name used by Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson.
In The Getting of Wisdom, Richardson recreated herself in fiction as an ordinary hapless schoolgirl named Laura Tweedle Rambotham, who attends a private boarding school for girls in Melbourne in the late-nineteenth century.
It begins with Laura entering the school as a young girl, ending like The Golden Day, on her last day, when she takes off her hat and runs off into the distance.
To read more about The Getting of Wisdom click here and here. Click here for the website of the Henry Handel Richardson Society.
The Getting of Wisdom was made into a film in 1978, directed by Bruce Beresford.
The Getting of Wisdom
Henry Handel Richardson
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by the British writer Muriel Spark (1918–2006), was first published in 1961.
The novel is set in a Scottish girls’ school in the 1930s, and is the story of a group of schoolgirls and their charismatic, flawed teacher, Miss Jean Brodie.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark
Alain-Fournier (1886–1914)
Alain-Fournier was killed serving in the French army in the early weeks of World War One.
The Lost Estate has twice been made into a film: in 1967 and again in 2006.
The Lost Estate is a French novel by Alain-Fournier, published in 1913. It’s the story of a friendship between two boys: the narrator, who is the son of the school teacher, and an older boy, Augustin Meaulnes, known by the nickname ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ (which means ‘the Great Meaulnes’).
One day Augustin disappears into the countryside and on his return he tells a strange and complicated tale of a beautiful house, a party and a young woman he met there. This experience is ‘the lost estate’, always to be sought for again and again, perhaps never to be found.
Le Grand Meaulnes (The Lost Estate)
Alain-Fournier
The book was made into the famous film Picnic at Hanging Rock by Peter Weir in 1975.
(See Film on this website).
At the Hanging Rock, William Ford 1875
Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock is about a girls’ school picnic in the bush one very hot St Valentine’s Day in 1900, when three girls and a teacher disappear while exploring a nearby rock formation.
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Joan Lindsay
A Passage to India by British novelist EM Forster (1879–1970), published in 1924, is the story of a young British woman, Adela Quested, who, while visiting India at the time of British rule, is taken for a day trip to the Marabar Caves by a local Muslim doctor, Dr Aziz.
Inside the cave she has an unexplained and terrifying experience and claims that Dr Aziz assaulted her. The truth of the matter is left unresolved by the end of the novel.
A Passage to India
EM Forster
This is the cover of the Rex Warner translation that Ursula studied herself in Year 12 in 1978.
Thucydides (approx.460–404 BC) was an ancient Greek historian and author of History of the Peloponnesian War, an account of the war between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 404 BC. It is commonly studied as part of school Ancient History courses, and is done so by the girls in The Golden Day for their final exams.
This eloquent and disturbing book is famous particularly for its recreated speeches of the leading individuals of the war, and for its harrowing descriptions of battles and the plague that spread disastrously through Athens.
You can see the text in translation in its entirety here.
History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides
The slate is made of a sheet of wax with a plastic page over it which the child writes on. When the page is lifted up, magically everything the child has written ‘disappears’, but in fact the impression of whatever was written remains on the wax sheet below.
Freud used this kind of toy as metaphor for how we can apparently forget things or wipe things from our conscious memory, but really everything is stored beneath the surface.
To read more about Freud’s ideas on the mystic writing pad click here and here.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, wrote a short piece in 1924 entitled ‘A Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad’ where he compared the workings of the mind with a popular children’s toy called a Wunderblock – similar to the ‘Magic Slate’ or ‘Etch-a-Sketch’ drawing toy.
The Mystic Writing Bad
Sigmund Freud
In Chapter 1
‘And Eli’sha sent a messenger to him, saying, “Go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored, and you shall be clean!”’ 2 Kings 5 v.10
In Chapter 12
‘Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand.’ 1 Kings 18 v.44
In Chapter 13
‘I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.’ Matthew 25 v.36
In Chapter 16
‘Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable.’ 1 Corinthians 15 v.52
The Bible is quoted at a number of points in The Golden Day.
Click on the verse citation for the full context of the quote.
The Bible
‘Because words were forming there, on the board, right before her eyes
... as though they were being written by an invisible hand.’
