SOURCE: "Cloisters of Memory," in Meanjin, Vol. 48, No. 3, September, 1989, pp. 531-39.

In the following essay, Jolley explores her own and other writers' loyalties to and embellishments of familiar landscapes and personal experiences in their literary works.

Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious,
 Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man . . .

I have always expected loyalty from a teapot, and so it is doubly distressing that my indestructible teapot has a small hole in it. Such hypocrisy goes against all ideas of true loyalty. Is it possible to compare human qualities with those of a teapot? Probably not.

The great loyalty of the fiction writer towards the reader is in the attempt to distil from landscape and experience particles of culture and background and to put this material into an available and acceptable form. To be loyal both to background and to reader, the writer needs to...