I for Isobel

by Amy Witting

"Amy Witting is comparable to Jean Rhys, but she has more starch, or vinegar. The effect is bracing."--The New Yorker

A best-selling portrait of the artist as a troubled young woman.

Isobel's imaginary friends include the Virgin Mary and Sherlock Holmes, Lord Byron, W.H. Auden, and T.S. Eliot. She's less at ease with the flesh-and-blood people she meets, and least of all with herself. But a lucky encounter and a little detective...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1922147745
• ISBN13: 9781922147745
• Release Date: February 2015
• Publisher: Text Classics
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

World of the unloved child

The reader is never told the real reason that Isobel, elder daughter of a neurotic, borderline mad woman, is totally unloved, but I suspect that she was born a little too early into the marriage to satisfy local conventions. While it isn't unknown for an attractive woman to be irrationally jealous of her more intelligent daughter, and even more so if the girl is attractive, Isobel's mother took this to the extreme, belittling her and destroying her self confidence to such a degree that she became moodily introspective and relied on imaginary friends who included the Virgin Mary and various authors. Her mother died when Isobel was only 17 and she was forced to take a room in a boarding house and to work in an office at menial tasks, far below her capacity. She makes friends with a group of University students who make her question her lack of further education and ultimately to realise that her path in life is far different from that which she had been raised to expect. It's a clever book, written by a clever writer and caused me to delve deeper into my own feelings than I was happy to do.

I LOVED this book

Isobel's struggle to understand the world she was living in. Her joy when she discovered books and found that in them she had friends and somewhere to belong. I loved her gradual blossoming once she had left her parents' house and found she was someone worthwhile. Later, when she revisited her old neighbourhood as an adult, she was to realise that most of the fears that had been ground into her as a child were lies. She was free. Free to become the person she knew she could be

I for Interesting, Intelligent and I Couldn't Put It Down

I confess to not having wanted to read fiction much for some years now. Reading other people's take on their own little segments of the world all seemed rather inconsequential and hardly to be rated against the best non-fiction. So now having established my philistine credentials, I have to say that Amy Witting has entirely won me over. This novel has the freshness and immediacy of what I consider to be good writing. As an Australian, the evocation of an older Australia, brought back odd memories of a Melbourne childhood. The setting is Sydney, sometime in the first part of the twentieth century and I suppose between the two world wars. The outer world hardly figures as the action mostly takes place within the child's universe, centring on the discordant relationship between Isobel and her mother. The emotional sadism of her parents is borne home to her when she makes a trip down "memory lane" to see her old house - both parents by then being dead - and meets a former neighbour of whom she had lived in dread due to an imagined misdemeanour, conjured up by her parents. But ultimately, "I For Isobel" is about a writer coming to understand her vocation, to understand her freakish bookishness and compulsive descent into the word "factory", her instinctual ability to observe, collect and record what she sees. For the first time in a long while, I can see that the writer's craft when it is practised at Witting's level is rather worthwhile after all.