Tag Archive: Picnic at Hanging Rock

Shadows & Influence

Joan Lindsay was born (1896) when Romanticism still cast its attractively unwholesome shadow and wrote her unique novel (1967) at the height of the Summer of Love.

In this chapter we attempt, briefly, to rope and steer the stubborn and amorphous beast that is influence, with respect to Picnic, both in the writing and its subsequent appreciation. Time and space were not frames of reference for Joan Lindsay. Unlike most of us, who use them to gauge, respectively, succession and mass and, together, motion, she regarded them as metaphysical states of mind.

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