Evelyn Juers: 3-book bundle

In 1933 the author and activist Heinrich Mann and his partner Nelly Kroeger fled Nazi Germany, finding refuge first in the south of France and later, in great despair, in Los Angeles, where Nelly committed suicide in 1944 and Heinrich died in 1950. This collective biography – which is criss-crossed by the lives of Heinrich’s brother Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf – won the 2009 Prime Minister's Award for Non-fiction.

The Recluse is the story of Evelyn Juers’ quest to find the elusive Eliza Donnithorne, thought to have been the model for the character of Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. It is a lace-work rich in connections and associations, at the heart of which her subject remains, irretrievable and dignified, an assertion of the value of the solitary life.

Evelyn Juers portrays the life and background of a pioneering Australian dancer, who died in tragic circumstances at the age of twenty-five. With detailed reference to Philippa Cullen’s personal papers and the recollections of those who knew her, The Dancer is at once an intimate and wide-ranging biography, a portrait of the artist as a young woman.