Helen Trinca

Thank you.

It's a pleasure.

I got very excited when I read her novel, A Pure Clear Light.

It had been republished by Text, I think around 2011.

And I read a review in The Australian, in fact, and thought, gosh, that's a great little book and ordered it and got it and was very, really loved it.

Loved the way she went straight into the story.

The dialogue was fantastic.

The observation was terrific.

The ideas were really good as well in that book, ideas about God and faith and love and marriage and how to be in the modern world.

Anyway, all delivered with a very light touch.

So I got quite interested in her and then more interested in her life as well because, of course, she was fairly unknown to Australians for a long, long time and had written only a few little books, four books.

But she came from a fairly famous family in some ways because her father, Ted St.

John, had been a very

well-known liberal politician, partly because he was such a dissident in some ways and such a maverick, I suppose we used to call him in the 60s.

And so, you know, I kind of was interested in that.

I discovered, as people had known for some time, that her mother had suicided when Madeleine was very young and that had really sort of damaged her and affected her life.

So that was the starting point to do the biography and also, of course, to read her other books.

Well, as a person, I mean, obviously I never knew her.

She died in 2006.

But I spoke, of course, to many, many people who knew her, her contemporaries, which was a wonderful biography to do because she left very few papers, well, no papers, really a few letters.