Jill Neville

Jill Neville (1932–1997), writer and critic, grew up in Sydney and attended a Blue Mountains boarding school. By the age of seventeen she was something of a muse to Sydney bohemians, and was courted by cricketer Keith Miller and artist Norman Lindsay. Arriving in London in the early 1950s, she initially lived on a Chelsea houseboat. When her brother Richard Neville arrived in London, she introduced him to people who helped launch the English incarnation of his magazine Oz, the first issues of which were published from her Bayswater home. Following early encouragement by the Canadian author Elizabeth Smart, in 1966 she published her first novel, Fall-Girl, which drew on her tumultuous relationships with the poets Peter Porter and Robert Lowell. Moving to Paris in about 1967, she published six more novels, the last three of which, Last Ferry To Manly, Swimming the Channel and The Day We Cut the Lavender, formed a loose trilogy exploring the experience of individuals torn between Europe and Australia. Through the 1980s and early 1990s she was a regular reviewer for the Independent, the Times Literary Supplement, the Observer, London Magazine and the Australian. She also wrote The Poet and the Goddess, a play about Robert Graves and Laura Riding staged in 1995 at Oxford, the Cheltenham Festival and the Everyman Theatre, Hampstead. A warm friend and a generous critic, Neville was married three times, the last time to the geneticist Lewis Wolpert.