Monica Elizabeth Jolley AO (4 June 1923 – 13 February 2007) was an English-born Australian writer who settled in Western Australia in the late 1950s and forged an illustrious literary career there.

She was also a pioneer of creative writing teaching in Australia, counting many well-known writers such as Tim Winton among her students at Curtin University.

"[2] Jolley was born in Birmingham, England as Monica Elizabeth Knight, to an English father and Austrian-born mother who was the daughter of a high ranking Railways official.

They eventually had three children and Leonard was appointed chief librarian at the Reid Library at the University of Western Australia, a job he held from 1960 to 1979.

In 1970 they also bought a small orchard in Wooroloo, a town in the Darling Ranges approximately 60 kilometres inland from Perth.

[8] Andrew Riemer, the Sydney Morning Herald's chief book reviewer, wrote in his obituary for her, "Jolley could assume any one of several personas – the little old lady, the Central European intellectual, the nurse, the orchardist, the humble wife, the university teacher, the door-to-door salesperson – at the drop of a hat, usually choosing one that would disconcert her listeners, but hold them in fascination as well".

Delys Bird suggests that it was the post-modern features of her writing – "motifs repeated within and between novels and short stories, self-reflexivity and open-endedness"[11] – that made it hard for them to be published at that time.

She lapsed in her writing, discouraged by earlier failures, and was only to be published again in 1983 with Miss Peabody's Inheritance and Mr Scobie's Riddle.

In an article in The Age newspaper, 20 February 2007, written after her death, literary critic Peter Craven, was reported as saying, "She was a master of black comedy and she went on to write a wholly different form of autobiographical fiction that was lucid, luminous and calm".