The Most Wonderful Thing
Madeleine: A Life of Madeleine St John
by Helen Trinca
Text, 2013, 280 pages, $32.99
Madeleine St John was “pickled in love” as a small child, but her life was marred by unresolved grief. She died alone in a London hospital at the age of sixty-four, just a few years after one of her novels was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
It all began so well. The elder daughter of Sydney barrister Edward (Ted) St John and his French wife Sylvette Carghier, Madeleine was a war baby, born in Sydney in 1941 while her father was serving with the AIF in Palestine. Ted St John was raised in hardship in the large family of a Church of England canon, acquiring a strong sense of duty and a puritanical streak. Sylvette’s parents, originally Romanian Jews, spent many years in Paris before migrating to Sydney. Madeleine’s sister Colette was born in late 1944. For a time the young family lived in cramped but fashionable quarters at Merioola, the Edgecliff mansion where most tenants were artists, dancers…
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