The Women in Black : Text Classics

Introduction by Bruce Beresford

The Ladies in Black stage musical by Carolyn Burns, with music and lyrics by Tim Finn, is based on this wonderful Australian classic.

At the very end of the Ladies Frocks Departments, past Cocktail Frocks, there was something very special, something quite, quite wonderful; but it wasnt for everybody: that was the point.

Because there, at the very end, there was a lovely arch, on which was written in curly letters 'Model Gowns'.

Written by a superb novelist of contemporary manners, The Women in Black is a fairytale which illuminates the extraordinariness of ordinary lives. The women in black are run off their feet, what with the Christmas rush and the summer sales that follow.

But its Sydney in the 1950s, and theres still just enough time left on a hot and frantic day to dream and scheme . . .

By the time the last marked-down frock has been sold, most of the staff of the Ladies Cocktail section at F. G. Goodes have been launched into slightly different careers. With the lightest touch and the most tender of comic instincts, Madeleine St John conjures a vanished summer of innocence.

The Women in Black is a great novel, a lost Australian classic.