Gwen Kelly (28 July 1922 – 19 August 2012) was an award-winning Australian novelist, short story writer and poet, whose fourth novel, Always Afternoon, was made into a television mini-series in 1988.
[11][12] One of her teachers was the Challis Professor of Philosophy (1927–58) John Anderson, a promoter of free thought in morality and politics and advocate of academic freedom.
Gwen Kelly's first novel, There Is No Refuge was published by Heinemann in 1961;[20][21] it portrays the life of a young Sydney woman through the Great Depression and WWII, and her religious and moral challenges while at university.
[24] Canada provided the landscape for her second novel The Red Boat (1968),[11] which "explores the extent to which a breakdown in childhood filial relationships can damage emotional development and well-being into adult life".
[27] Her third novel, The Middle-Aged Maidens, published in 1976, is set in a private girls' school in a small town, and is narrated by one of the schoolteachers and three successive headmistresses.
"[29]: 111 Reviewers appreciated that "the headmistresses' characters are sketched with sharp and brilliant lines ...... Gwen Kelly draws from us that complexity of response which is normal in life, rare in literature";[30] and described the novel as "spiteful, malicious, cunning, intensely readable .....
While some critics described the romance as a "vapid Romeo-and-Juliet scenario",[29] other reviewers commented that "Kelly depicts very well Freda's adolescence and the conflict between her love and her puritanical upbringing.
[41][42][43] Arrows of Rain (1988) was her fifth novel, "covering forty years in the life of the Drayton family beginning with the opening of the Sydney Harbour bridge and closing with the advent of the Whitlam government."