SOURCE: "Three Short Story Writers—Peter Cowan, Elizabeth Jolley, Justina Williams," in Westerly, Vol. 25, No. 2, June, 1980, pp. 104-07.

In the following essay, Williams offers a favorable assessment of The Travelling Entertainer.

Elizabeth Jolley .. . is much concerned with charm, sometimes in her characters, as in the stories here [in The Travelling Entertainer] that concern a lovable Uncle Bernard. Sometimes, too, earlier in her career, she aimed too deliberately for a whimsical delicacy of tone. Her latest collection, however, shows her preoccupied with various kinds of darkness. Her sympathies lie with obscure and eccentric individuals who construct a world for themselves in a hostile, categorically-minded society. . . . Jolley's is an art of the expansive, the anecdotal, the production of a hundred tiny details which gradually form the irregular maze of a life. Her characters wander, not searching for an exit, but as though when every familiar path has been charted in...