First edition. The Anglo-Australian writer Patrick White (1912-1990) was born in Britain, and spent much of the first part of his life in England, where he was a student at Cheltenham College (1925-1929) and King’s College, Cambridge (1932-1935), before settling in London and publishing his first novel, Happy Valley (1939). Apart from his wartime service, White remained in London until 1948, when he moved with his partner Manoly Lascaris to Australia, where he continued to publish plays, poetry, short stories, and novels. His ninth novel, The Eye of the Storm, ‘is centred on the death of the aristocratic Mrs Elizabeth Hunter, based squarely on Patrick White’s own mother, Ruth’ (Hubber and Smith). White began work on the novel in 1970, completed the last of a number of drafts in late 1972, and the book was first published by Cape in an edition of 23,000 copies on 16 September 1973 (the dustwrapper was designed by the artist Desmond Digby, who had designed a number of dustwrappers and theatre sets for White since the early 1960s).¶¶

In 1973 White was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – the first and (to date) the only Australian writer to be so honoured – for ‘his epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature’ (Award ceremony speech. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach 2025. Fri. 18 Apr 2025. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1973/ceremony-speech/), and advance copies of The Eye of the Storm were ‘rushed to Sweden in anticipation of the Nobel Prize announcement’ (Hubber and Smith). In his presentation speech, Artur Lundkvist of the Swedish Academy praised The Eye of the Storm, commenting that in the central character of the old woman ‘the author has taken the experience of a cyclone as the mystical centre from which an insight radiates to shed light on her life, with its many misadventures, right up to the moment of her death’ (loc. cit.). ¶¶

The Eye of the Storm was later filmed in an adaptation directed by Fred Schepsi, which starred Charlotte Rampling, Judy Davis, and Geoffrey Rush, and was released in 2011. ¶¶

B. Hubber and V. Smith, Patrick White: A Bibliography, M1a. ¶¶

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