SOURCE: "Inside/Outside Families," in Helplessly Tangled in Female Arms and Legs: Elizabeth Jolley's Fictions, University of Queensland Press, 1993, pp. 68-80.

In the essay below, Salzman asserts that Jolley's stories present untraditional family structures and values as a means of questioning the process of communication.

Perhaps our idea of family is an idyllic one and has never really existed outside hope and imagination

Elizabeth Jolley, "The Changing Family—Who Cares?"

In Jolley's fiction, a displacement of the traditional family structure often aligns itself with an interrogation of the whole process of communication. A good example of this dual interrogation of both the family and the nature of the communicative process occurs in two interlinked stories, "The Performance" and "The Shed". In each story the same photocopied form-letter is sent by a family to a grandmother. Instead of the personal communication she longs for, it is a bulletin for...