These Nights Belong to Us

I was in the final semester of my undergraduate degree when I first read Elizabeth Jolley’s 1983 novel Miss Peabody’s Inheritance. With the earnestness of an English major having only recently studied Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1928), I had immersed myself in discourse surrounding women’s spaces and access to knowledge. Incidentally, this was the same semester that I became involved in the Women’s Collective, advocating for breastfeeding-accessible spaces on campus. I was planning ahead for postgraduate research, wanting to find some way to delve deeper into the aspect of women’s writing I found most intriguing: the tension between domesticity and creativity, two equally demanding and, often, seemingly incompatible states. Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, with its metafictional commentary and preoccupation with women’s writing practices across alternating frames of narrative, seemed to encapsulate this topic in a way I knew I needed to explore further. It was the first line of Jolley’s novel that piqued my creative and critical interest: ‘The nights belonged to the novelist.’

It’s 3:30 a.m. My baby, having fed from me for the third time tonight, has rolled into my wife’s arms. Rather than savouring the few hours of sleep before he next calls for me, I do what I always say I will, yet never quite manage, at this time.

Write.

I’ve missed the stillness of this hour. It is where I first formed my writing practice; unravelling the nights of Elizabeth Jolley and her novelist characters in my Master’s research, ideas synthesising in the silence of my own nights. Years have passed since I first discovered the necessity of this practice, since I last picked up a pen, really – so preoccupied have my hands been in this season of nurturing life. As my life narrowed to the feed-play-sleep cycle, the ideas that were once so pressing became stagnant, the urge to create stifled. I forgot that the night could be anything other than a battle: please, go back to bed. But lately, there’s been a magnetic pull, a recollection of something outside this cycle which calls for my attention. And now I am here, fingertips dancing to a rhythm not yet forgotten as words return to me, from me, spilling onto the page. Though sounds of life continue – a symphony of crickets and cicadas, the refrigerator humming down the hall – there’s an absence of cars and neighbours, children and phones. Of need. I’ve missed such stillness – the time not only to write, but to think. Daycare will not call, nor will my sister. Any emails entering my inbox will not warrant immediate reply. The house rests in its nightly reset, not yet muddied by hands big or small. In this moment, I am not needed. In this absence, I tend to needs of my own.

When reading Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, I noted its preoccupation with the times and spaces most hospitable for women’s writing. Still thinking of Woolf’s Room, I began exploring this idea of the night ‘belonging’ to women writers in particular. There’s a poem by Kelly Cressio-Moeller, ‘A Night of One's Own’ (2014) – included in her debut poetry collection Shade of Blue Trees (2021) – which encapsulates the aspects that intrigue me most about the practice: the silence and stillness which foster the imaginative process; ‘whistling in the dark, singing to the moon’; the savouring of solitude as all, even the basset hound, sleep, and your words come alive. Although night writing is solitary, Cressio-Moeller implies it is a practice shared by women across generations. Just as she and Virginia (Woolf) share cigarettes across time and space, so too do other women writers occupy the night. Though Woolf’s room was originally posed as a tangible one, complete with a lock and standing for the freedom to think independently, Cressio-Moeller’s follows in the more symbolic conceptions of the space; it is the night – enclosing her in stillness rather than four walls – that provides the key to unlock her creativity and articulate words unspoken in the day. Of course, this is not to disregard the long history of male writers preferring late hours – Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Henry Miller come to mind – but rather, to acknowledge a practice born of gendered necessity for women negotiating competing demands. Indeed, this sentiment was expressed in Florence Nightingale’s essay ‘Cassandra’, written in 1852 and circulated widely just a year prior to A Room of One’s Own. Interestingly, Woolf quotes Nightingale directly in her essay yet omits the integral clause (here in italics): ‘Women never have an (sic) half-hour in all their lives (excepting before or after anybody is up in the house) that they can call their own, without fear of offending or of hurting someone.’ But what does this mean for women, if the night is the only time belonging to them? And if the night is theirs, as it is mine, does it mean the day is not?

Night writing lurks in the shadows of women’s literary history. Its presence is there, mentioned as an aside in interviews and biographies, yet its significance for women’s writing is often overlooked – condensed to a footnote in an author’s life. Generations of women have found solace in the night, embracing an escape from domestic and familial duties in the hours between dusk and dawn. Sylvia Plath describes her ‘still, blue, almost eternal hour before cockcrow, before the baby’s cry’, lyricising the tranquillity of this time. Plath adopts a night writing practice following the separation from her husband, in a period her biographer Diane Middlebrook deems the most productive of Plath’s life. Waking at 4 a.m. with a blissful four hours to channel her energy and focus into her writing before her children rise, Plath notes, ‘I have never been so happy anywhere as writing at my huge desk in the blue dawns, all to myself, secret and quiet.’ Toni Morrison, too, formed her writing practice as a young mother, embracing the pre-dawn hours for the unrivalled concentration they permitted. This theme resonates throughout As Good as a Yarn with You (1992), a collection of letters between early twentieth-century women writers. Miles Franklin laments the ‘external infernal nagging chores that sap our strength and rob us of self-expression’, her words echoing the weariness Sybylla Melvyn feels in Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901). As Marjorie Barnard and Eleanor Dark discuss in their own letters, the night is often the only time conducive to their creative practice, yet the willpower it demands is difficult to sustain. This raises a question I often return to: what, exactly, does the night do to women’s writing?

Remnants of night linger in shadows beneath bleary eyes. Come morning, my body shuffles to the kettle, craving caffeine. Though night writing has largely evaded critical attention, its existence can be traced through women’s literature, across genres – evidence of a practice with deep roots, covered but not invisible. Beyond the writing practices of authors themselves, night writers appear as characters. The aforementioned Sybylla Melvyn, weary from manual labour and the chores that dictate her daily routine, claims the night for her writing practice, as does Morag Gunn in Margaret Laurence’s künstlerroman The Diviners (1974). Though Morag struggles to maintain these hours, ‘too tired and lousy most evenings to do any writing at all’, they are the only ones available for her creative expression, especially upon becoming a mother. Jo March of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Emily Starr of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon (1923), Celie of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) – all notable fictional night writers. In Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, the night writers are abundant. The frame story centres on Miss Dorothy Peabody, a lonely woman living in England whose existence, previously defined by clerical and care duties, comes to revolve around her magical evenings and the exchange of epistolary correspondence with Australian novelist Diana Hopewell. Early references establish Diana as the novelist to whom the night belongs, but as the narrative progresses, so too does Miss Peabody’s writerly identity. Through Diana’s letters we receive the story-within-a-story; instalments of her developing novel reveal Miss Thorne, a headmistress on a European holiday with her friends, lovers, and students – roles which happen to be interchangeable – to be a literary woman in her own right. Across all levels of narration, women utilise the night to express desires that are otherwise shadowed in the daylight. It is through the metafictional preoccupation with the construction of the text that the reader of Miss Peabody’s Inheritance is called to also consider the author outside of these frames, Elizabeth Jolley herself, whose autobiographical materials contemplate the times and spaces most favourable for writing.

Elizabeth Jolley – acclaimed Australian author of fifteen novels, four short story collections, and recipient of many prizes including the Miles Franklin and NSW Premier Literary Awards – often reflected on the tension between writing and her duties as a mother and wife. In an interview with Candida Baker, she described the habit of making a ‘quick note’ during the day, capturing ideas to revisit that evening. ‘You see, I was a housewife with three children. I used to write late at night when everybody had gone to bed.’ Elsewhere, she described night as the ‘best time’ for writing because ‘I am not needed in their dreams’. Later, like Plath before her, she would adopt the practice of rising at 4:30 a.m., finding herself most productive in the hours before her husband would call for his morning cup of tea. Writing, for Jolley, was intertwined with the domestic; written in notes scrawled between chores, her fiction explores women’s interior spaces. Negotiating time and domesticity was of direct significance in her writing life, and she meditated on the matter in her fiction. In Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, this meditation finds its form through the motif of the night. Yet unlike the nights Jolley presented in interviews – a simple, even ideal, solution to conflicting responsibilities; a testament to her willpower and ability to ‘hurry up with shopping and cooking or whatever’ and ‘squeeze in the time’ to write – Miss Peabody’s nights are fraught with contradictions.

In contrast to the mundanity of Miss Peabody’s days – hours of ‘long enforced wakefulness’ consumed by clerical work, domestic chores, and tending to others – the night offers imaginative release, allowing her to transcend the confines of her family home in England. Nights are magical and enchanting, certainly, and crucial to Miss Peabody’s literary development, but they remain a complicated time on the twenty-four-hour clock. Unlike the idyllic reprieve Jolley suggests when speaking of the night in interviews, Miss Peabody’s Inheritance considers its intricacies and nuances. During this window, Miss Peabody, Diana and Miss Thorne are able to experiment with desires otherwise inaccessible, yet a sense of entrapment arises. In relegating desire to the night, the novel considers the consequences of suppressing or restricting creativity. And though Miss Peabody claims these late hours as her own, the demands of domesticity continue to encroach on her writing time. Presented as an entirely unsympathetic character, Miss Peabody’s mother, Mrs Peabody, embodies the incessant expectations imposed on women in the domestic sphere. Confined to her bed, she has the seemingly omnipresent ability to sense whether the mantlepiece needs dusting or tinned soup is shelved incorrectly, as if her bodily needs have merged with those of the house itself. Miss Peabody is bound to her family home in care of her widowed mother, suffering through hours of warming milk, dusting shelves, and administering affection in the form of prayers and handholding – obstacles to be dealt with before she can have time for herself. Yet even in the night, Miss Peabody experiences difficulties when working within the confines of the home. ‘Dotty! Dotty!’ Mrs Peabody’s voice pierces through the tranquillity, urging her daughter to switch off the light, or dust the piano, or wash the potato saucepan.

Such intrusions, once unquestioned, incite an increasing reluctance in Miss Peabody. Having been introduced by Diana to the possibilities that exist outside the domestic sphere, Miss Peabody can no longer bear the tedium of her duties. Though she begins to identify as a novelist herself, she is unable to reconcile this calling with the responsibilities entrenched in the family home. Eventually, mental instability settles in. The frustration at having such limited time for writing, compounded by the lack of sleep these obscure hours require, culminates in madness. Miss Peabody is increasingly unable to differentiate between Diana’s fiction and her own reality; in drifting between the two worlds, she loses touch with the latter and expects to see the fictional characters come to life. Two worlds collide as the identities of woman and writer are brought into conflict, each identity demanding time, effort, and energy.

It’s an insatiable beast, this desire to create; the hours are mine but they are never enough. Words, time, energy rapidly decline. I recall a line from Cressio-Moeller’s poem: ‘some words can only be written at night’. For years, I understood the longing to express desires invisible in the light of day. Now, I feel the frustration of only having time for some words. Not all of them. Not the ones swirling, half-formed, dancing atop the cliffs of consciousness; desperate to show their sense, their validity, prove themselves worthy of my aching fingers and blue-filtered screen. An hour passes, another tea is made, the melodic tapping of my keyboard fades until the crickets and cicadas are harmonising without me. Was it always this hard, writing at night?

Were we always this tired?

Jolley’s conception of the night draws on its associations with mystery and misdeeds. Secrecy is nurtured under the cover of darkness, whispers of lust and desire – for writing, for women – are uttered, only to be hushed in the daylight. In Diana’s early letters containing drafts of her manuscript, the night is positioned as scary, threatening, hostile; ‘othered’, in the sense women are within a patriarchal culture, their work and unspoken desires relegated to the darkest corners of the home. Describing a cold and ugly evening, Diana writes of Miss Thorne and Miss Snowdon braving a snowstorm in search of Miss Edgely. The harsh elements and ‘grotesque’ and ‘sinister’ landscape instil horror in Miss Thorne and her companions as they navigate unfamiliar territory. The language is distinctly sexualised here. She-oaks moan, wind shrieks, cold penetrates beneath their coats – and then there is stillness. Quiet falls upon Miss Thorne and Miss Snowdon, the same quality Miss Peabody seeks in her own explorative evenings. ‘The song of the wind changes; it seems to contain the voices of people talking, it swells and softens, it shrieks and laughs and disappears leaving a silence so empty that both women clutch each other.’ This passage evokes female sensuality; the softness of a woman’s touch, the comfort to be found in each other’s embrace. Yet more than that, I see an allusion to the collective of women who have claimed the night. The voices of women unseen across generations, shrieking and laughing in acknowledgement of a shared yet solitary practice. Although Miss Thorne is wary of the unknown, the night transforms for her as she fantasises about the erotic possibilities of sleeping beneath the stars. Darkness provides refuge for women to explore and embrace their sexuality, yet their desires are contained in and limited by the night. Miss Thorne invites Miss Edgely to ‘come away to bed’, a student offers to show her headmistress ‘what to do with your hands’, Miss Peabody is aroused by the letters and fantasises about Diana; by relying on euphemisms and innuendos, the novel refuses the type of identification which would allow the same-sex desire to transcend its nighttime confines.

This is exemplified in the encounter between Miss Thorne and her student, Gwendaline Manners. Following the ‘idyllic, tender, hilarious and ludicrous night’ which results in the two breaking a bed, Gwendaline develops a crush on her teacher. Yet Gwendaline’s menstrual blood, soaking the girl’s virginal white dress, serves as a reminder of the ‘purpose of her body to which Miss Thorne knows she has no right’. In a letter to the girl one evening, Thorne writes: ‘the Night of the Thunderstorm was in a sense a night on its own. The night can be treasured but, at the same time it is something to be put away, tucked safely in the memory as something belonging to those things which are not within the power of repetition.’ Albeit problematic on many levels, especially considering the exploitative and predatory power wielded by the Headmistress, their encounter is preserved in memory – as a powerful culmination of female desire exploding in intimacy yet, ultimately, forbidden.

In Jolley’s practice, as in her novel, the night provided a temporary reprieve from gendered duties and offered an opportunity to create. Yet as those of us who have claimed these hours know, there’s more to it than simply convenience. There is something about the night which seems to foster experimental ideas, providing clarity and motivation as it conveys urgency within the writer. For Jolley, the night nurtured an internal state of creativity and allowed her to experiment with form and style. She described the process of writing Miss Peabody’s Inheritance in an interview with Stephanie Trigg; she had two separate stories to begin with, but the ‘method of telling really fell into my lap at this very table one night’. After responding to fan mail from a woman in England, Jolley found herself using the epistolary form to intertwine her two discrete narratives. ‘I was joining Peabody to these people in the novel, in the other story, and from then on I just went straight ahead and of course I switched, in the middle of a sentence, sometimes, from one to the other […] and it seemed to go so easily. I’ve not had that experience before or since.’ Once she had this revelation, she was up ‘all night, every night, to put it down’. She rushed to cement her words onto the page and returned to this state of mind each night – a process we see replicated in the novel itself. We learn that Diana is writing against the clock in more ways than one; she dies mid-sentence, leaving behind an incomplete manuscript. The hurried tone of her letters takes on newfound urgency as we consider her writing in the face of disability and illness. It is the immediacy of Diana’s style, the frenetic energy conveyed in present-tense narration which allows us, as it does Miss Peabody, to immerse ourselves in the fragments of her imagination. Diana invites Miss Peabody in, often without so much as a greeting: ‘Am in a tearing hurry, the writing hardly stayed on the page, it’s the approach to drama in the Thorne, Manners, Edgely affair.’ With the ever-present threat of her mother’s interruptions looming across the landing of the Peabody home, Miss Peabody consumes the letters with the same feverish energy in which they were written.

Miss Peabody’s nights are transient, available in short intervals and subject to interruptions. A fleeting window of time, rather than Virginia Woolf’s fixed room of one’s own. This sense of transience manifests in the fragmentation of the narrative, mimicking the interruptions of the night through the structure of the text. Rapidly oscillating between the framing story of Miss Peabody and Diana’s story of Miss Thorne, the novel’s abrupt shifts in narration deny the reader an immersive experience. Just as the women writers within – and without – the novel are denied extended periods of creativity, the reader of Miss Peabody’s Inheritance is subject to repeated disturbances. This has a destabilising effect as the text shifts between frames, often without any clear indication like an ellipses or chapter marker. Frequently attributed to care and domestic responsibilities, these shifts in narration reflect the state of consciousness of one accountable to the competing needs of others.

After the novel’s introduction to Miss Thorne, the narrative abruptly shifts in its first transition. ‘Dotty! Dotty!’ Mrs Peabody calls, summoning her daughter out from the novelist and demanding hot milk. Miss Peabody is again interrupted by her mother’s incessant call when reading notes about Miss Thorne’s character development, and later still, in the midst of reading Diana’s instructions to avoid clichés – instructions to which she remains painfully oblivious: ‘Miss Peabody whose life, not from her own fault at all, had become a series of clichés and platitudes, agreed. It takes all sorts to make the world go round, she started her own reply on her blue writing paper.’ Denied the time to immerse herself in the development of her craft, is it any wonder that her writing remains derivative?

By shining light on a practice forged in darkness, we can explore the lasting implications of relegating women’s writing to the night. More than simply highlighting the artificiality of the text/s, metafictional allusions suggest a lingering authorial anxiety which pervades the writer characters. Formulated by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), ‘anxiety of authorship’ is a concept that seeks to explain the enduring impact of an historically male-dominated writing tradition on the female literary consciousness. Although Madwoman explores this concept in nineteenth-century women’s writing – and indeed argues these anxieties are overcome as women invert stereotypes and write their way into a literary tradition – the ‘self-doubt, inadequacy, and inferiority’ which characterise authorial anxiety are evident in the self-reflexivity of Miss Peabody’s Inheritance. There remains in Jolley’s novel a lingering presence of the patriarchal values by which women’s writing is held to standard, and a sense of insecurity manifests. ‘I shall have to be careful, the novelist added in small writing to squeeze as much as possible on to the bottom of the last page, about clichés; in future I shall underline them with a red pen.’ Emendations, whether in the form of identifying typing mistakes – ‘copulation in pubic schools’ is a particularly unfortunate one – inserting explanations, or criticising clichés are abundant throughout, capturing the thoughts, writing processes, and anxieties of the multiple writer characters. Miss Thorne demonstrates similar anxieties, consistently and clumsily trying to identify with her notably male cultural influences. Even under shelter of the night, women are writing within patriarchy and cannot escape its gaze. The nights may be theirs, but the dominant – masculine, daytime – culture they inhabit and must have their work measured against is not.

From the opening sentence on, variations of ‘the nights belonged to the novelist’ are repeated throughout the novel, recalling the reader to the imaginative landscape of the evening and the possibilities that emerge. It is at bedtime as a child that Miss Peabody discovers the ‘dusty magic’ concealed within the pages of a story, yet she loses access to this fictional realm upon her father’s death. It is not until her correspondence with Diana that she rediscovers the magic of the evening and finds a literary foremother to guide her development to authorship. Miss Peabody consumes Diana’s letters and crafts her own, embellishing her life with tales of fictitious lovers and experiences. ‘Perhaps it is in the writing’, as Diana muses, ‘that the writer remakes himself and his world’. Miss Peabody’s liberation is traced through the novel’s progression and her life is transformed through these imaginative evenings. Though at first, her letters to Diana recount a bleak life with a routine that ‘never varied’, Miss Peabody is enlivened through their correspondence and not only begins to invent things about her life, but also to resist the stifling patterns she has grown to resent. In doing so, she experiences a series of comedically awkward encounters. Her acts of rebellion are, on the surface, small – ‘Miss Peabody in the lasting pleasure of the new letter took a hot bath. It was not her night for a bath.’ – but for a woman whose existence was previously defined by her mother’s list of chores and the ‘same drab pattern’ of her father’s daily commute to London, they are quite significant. She imagines her independence growing ‘wild and free’ and, on her mother’s death, escapes the structure of the family home and makes the transgressive journey to Australia. Through the secrecy of the night – a motif which alludes to the silencing of women’s voices, in much the same way the metafictional preoccupations reflect the tradition of authorial anxiety – Miss Peabody is not only exposed to a tradition of writing which subverts the values of her father and his literature – she physically enters into it with an inheritance.

Night writing has never felt as necessary for my practice as it does in these first years postpartum; nor, I note, has it ever felt as draining. Even when my son is occupied in the day, out of the house, with my wife or his aunty or daycare, I’m unable to truly access that creative state. I can’t put my phone on silent because I need to be available. What if something happens – an allergy, an accident? He is in safe and loving hands but my heart – the heart I need to write – is not my own. It is only at night, when he is asleep in the room beside me – no sweet laughter drawing my attention; no ‘Mama, come!’ to compel me from the chair; knowing he is safe beside my wife, his Mum – that my heart feels my own, content with his beating safely in the room next door. But I am exhausted. Dinner, bath, bed, cleaning, resetting the household so that morning feels manageable: all this takes time and energy, exhausting my reserves. And even if my wife does the bulk of it, as she so often does, I’m wrangling guilt from the desk as I hear her wash dishes and clean floors. So often, I’ll plan to rise at my son’s first, or second, or third call of the night, let my fingers wrap around the pen, its ink desperate to be spilled; too often, I dismiss the words forming in the periphery of my mind and instead wrap my body around his, soothing us back to sleep. Still, the night calls me from the fringes of slumber. Still, whether a week or two years pass, the night is always available for me to return. And return and return and return, I do.

The stillness of this time quietens the mind and allows for undivided attention. The nagging of my internal to-do lists ceases: I do not need to buy milk, reschedule an appointment, check my phone, eat. I am present, I am focused, I am here and I am writing. But the night offers more than silence. Frenetic energy is channelled through my words as the immediacy of the hour becomes apparent, body weary and clock ticking. Time is fleeting, and I am tired. These hours feel unsustainable yet somehow, it’s the instability that works. Perhaps because it simply has to; I don’t have the luxury of agonising over sentences (is this the best word? Could I be more succinct?). Minutes, then hours pass, time closes in and words flow with ease in their unfiltered state. Tomorrow, I will sweep through the document, ruthlessly track changes in that anxiety-inducing red font. I will tidy my grammar, restructure sentences, but the process will be made easier because of the writing that comes in the night. Sitting in a room which feels like my own, I refuse to over-analyse my writing; that will come, tomorrow, but for now I enjoy the ease with which my words flow. I adopt a stream-of-consciousness style of writing because that is how I best express these thoughts, using lengthy sentences which contain too many clauses because suddenly, after labouring over concepts throughout the day, they finally make sense. I insert myself into the narrative: I am a woman, writing at night, about women who write at night. These experiences are mine as they are Jolley’s, Miss Peabody’s, Sylvia Plath’s, Toni Morrison’s, Sybylla Melvyn’s. The women who came before me, who will come after, weary from domestic labour and desperate for solitude. A truth we have accepted in the darkest corners of our homes, while the rest of the world sleeps, and nothing but our mind and our pen call for attention. The nights, as Jolley writes so often in Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, belong to us.