Lesbians and Palimpsests: On Beverley Farmer’s Alone

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I’m here to write about lesbians and palimpsests. Depending on whether you’re a big dyke or a big nerd, you may know more about one than the other, so I’ll explain both.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a palimpsest is ‘a parchment or other writing-material written upon twice, the original writing having been erased or rubbed out to make place for the second; a manuscript in which a later writing is written over an effaced earlier writing’. More interesting, for metaphorical purposes, is what can happen after reinscription: sometimes, years after the initial ink has been ‘erased’ and written over, a ghostly trace of the original will arise from the parchment, and the two layers of prose will swirl into each other. English writer and literary critic Thomas de Quincey termed the symbolic iteration of this process ‘involution’, a term applied when our deepest thoughts and feelings ‘pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects […] in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled’.

Does this sound familiar?

According to my life experience, a lesbian is a person who can become totally enmeshed in the consciousness and body of her lover, and vice versa, until it is difficult to discern where one woman begins and the other ends. And yet, they are separate people. And yet, they are not.

You can see what I’m getting at here. Lesbians and palimpsests have something in common. Postcolonial, psychoanalytic and deconstructive critics also delight in the metaphorical potential of the palimpsest, but that’s beyond the remit of this particular essay.

You can see what I’m getting at here. Lesbians and palimpsests have something in common.

I first began to note these similarities in 2017, when, like many a young contemporary queer scholar, I became obsessed with novels about problematically entangled queer female pairs. Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk, Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, Kayla Rae Whitaker’s The Animators, Rachel B Glaser’s Paulina & Fran, Laura McPhee-Browne’s Cherry Beach, the list goes on. Each of these novels sees a kind of involution in which the consciousness of the queer narrator is refracted through the consciousness of her pair and, like the palimpsest, there is, as cultural theorist Sarah Dillon has described, ‘a simultaneous relation of intimacy and separation’.

Of the novels listed above, only McPhee-Browne’s is Australian. And while Cherry Beach takes on this symbolic potential in its themes and narrative, it does not deal with the concept directly. As a queer Australian woman and writer, I am always looking for queer female Australian novels. And as a literary nerd, I am always looking for queer female Australian novels that engage with the idea of the palimpsest. Given the shortage of lesbian Australian literature generally, however, crossover between my two desired novelistic characteristics rarely occurs. But earlier this year, I struck gold. Giramondo has recently republished Melburnian writer Beverley Farmer’s debut novel, Alone, which was first released in 1980. And from the cover image alone—a reproduction of a Joy Hester painting in which two women’s faces merge into each other—I knew I was about to feast.

Beverley Farmer was born in 1941, and Alone is set in Melbourne in the late 1950s. The novel is the story of eighteen-year-old Shirley, whose love affair with enigmatic classmate Catherine has unceremoniously ended. That is, Shirley has been dumped. Shirley has now dropped out of university, is living in an impoverished boarding house, works in a dreary cafe and is very seriously contemplating suicide, hoping her ex might show up and stop her. The threat of male violence is constant, and homophobia is rife. A tale as old as time. And yet, until 2024, Alone had been out of print for many years.

Alone is loosely autobiographical—the Carlton setting, the Greek migrant neighbours, the suicidal ideation of the protagonist. Farmer spoke to these autobiographical parallels on multiple occasions. Interestingly, however, if you google ‘Beverley Farmer lesbian’ or ‘Beverley Farmer queer’, nothing comes up. The surface layer of biographical information about Farmer provides no reference to her own queerness. One must probe the digital palimpsest.

Speaking to Marylynn Scott for Kunapipi in 1994, Farmer confirmed that the primary relationship in Alone was based on a lesbian experience she had while at university when she was twenty. Farmer initially wrote the novel as a heterosexual tale—partly because Farmer’s parents were alive and they did not know about this past relationship, and partly because she didn’t think general readers would accept a lesbian affair—and she published a short story to this effect in 1968. However, by 1980, Farmer’s parents had died, and she felt that she could no longer write Shirley’s lover as male. ‘I felt it was inauthentic,’ she explained. ‘I had not experienced first love as love with a man and I couldn’t fake it to that degree. I hadn’t even seen the male genitalia at that point.’ As such, the publication journey of Alone was itself a kind of queer involution—a merging of private and public selves over time, mixed determinations of lesbian palatability: Alone was always queer, but years needed to go by before the lesbian ink could seep to the surface.

Though we never meet Catherine, Shirley’s ex-lover, she is an indelible presence throughout Alone. She is there on every page, in Shirley’s yearning, her memory, the palimpsest of her mind: ‘She is not there. I knew that all the time. Of course I knew she wouldn’t be there all the time.’ Then, not a few pages later: ‘I love you. Where are you? Aren’t you coming? You have to come. You do still love me. Still love me. Perhaps it is not too late.’ Every time Shirley laments Catherine’s absence, there she is again, the ghost that haunts the parchment, the forgotten ink rising and merging with the consciousnesses of the present.

Though the concept of yearning is not the exclusive terrain of lesbians, there is something particularly queer about Shirley’s fixation, her desire to retain possession of the memory of her lost love. For, like many queer couples past and present, Shirley and Catherine’s relationship had to be kept in secret. Though this kind of enforced secrecy has many negatives—generalised queerphobia, internalised shame, interpersonal conflict and so on—it also means that there is an intensity, a heightened intimacy, in the dynamics of the relationship. It keeps the love sacred, in a way, unseen and untouched by all else.

So when this bond is severed (in this case, because Catherine is not comfortable with being out to her friends), the memory of the relationship exists in a strange, extreme, liminal space because it survives only in the minds and hearts of the lovers themselves. There is no one else to verify that it ever happened, so we get invocations like the following from Shirley, addressed to a lover who will never hear her: ‘Whatever happens, never forget that it was not something imaginary between us, but deep and real.’ Given that the receiver of this invocation is the reader and not Catherine, Farmer is tasking us with the remembrance of a love that will otherwise fade into oblivion. We too are involuted into the palimpsest of Farmer’s creation.

There is something particularly queer about Shirley’s fixation.

Although I find myself often frustrated when readers assume that I am my own fictional characters, I do read Shirley as a proxy for teenage Farmer: she, too, is a poet, a young writer from Melbourne with aspirations of greatness. She submits stories to journals like Meanjin and gets rejected (haven’t we all?). She writes two scenes for a novel and imagines the praise she will receive: ‘Then the reviews. “A poetic novel of passionate intensity, an extraordinary achievement for one so young…” […] “If not The, then at least A Great Australian Novel.”’

But Shirley’s real masterpiece (ironic, yes, that there is still no feminised version of this term), of course, is Alone itself—the first-person, dramatic monologue that records her queer love and life. Shirley says that the poems she writes for her beloved are ‘palimpsests of purple poetry’: they are the indexical traces of her queer involution. At the novel’s end, when she realises her love will not come, she says, ‘I’ve spoilt my life. There are no new starts, no new leaves. Palimpsests. I am a palimpsest of purple prose.’ That is, Shirley herself becomes the palimpsest, and the palimpsest becomes the novel.

So yes, Alone ends bleakly, speaking to the culturally enforced self-immolation of so many queer people pre-queer liberation. But modern readers know a different world. As Alone finds new audiences with its republication, Shirley’s voice—the voice of a depressed, melodramatic lesbian living in mid-century Melbourne—emerges into the contemporary, and Farmer’s legacy is reinscribed in the growing canon of queer female Australian literature.

New readers bring their own experiences of queer love, longing and coming of age to the novel, and the texture of the palimpsest thickens. We can read Alone alongside more recent works, such as Dylin Hardcastle’s A Language of Limbs, Natasha Rai’s An Onslaught of Light and Hannah Kent’s Devotion. Today, Shirley is alone and not alone; we are with her and she is with us, and yet none of us are together. As she herself writes: ‘But where does the surface end? […] Nowhere. Everywhere.’

KYD’s Queer Critic Series is supported by the Cultural Fund, the philanthropic arm of the Copyright Agency.