A Fringe of Leaves (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) [Mass Market Paperback]

Patrick White (Author)

Book Description

Series: Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics | Publication Date: January 1, 1995

Returning to England in 1840, the "Bristol Maid" is shipwrecked on the Queensland Coast and Mrs Roxburgh is taken prisoner by a tribe of Aborigines. In the course of her escape, she is torn by loyalties - to her dead husband, to her rescuer, to her own and to her adoptive class.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (January 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140186107
• ISBN-13: 978-0140186109
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #114,514 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Timeless Portrait of Humanity and Cross-Culturalism, April 24, 2003

By 

"cmmerchant" (Euless, TX United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Fringe of Leaves (Mass Market Paperback)

Read any review of Patrick Whites A Fringe of Leaves and you will expect it to be an exciting tale. One that includes adventures on the sea, a frightening shipwreck, and deaths of important characters; a tale of enslavement by the wild and savage Australian aborigines, sex, and cannibalism; a tale of the heroic rescue of a damsel in distress by an escaped convict. But if you are expecting this adventurous and daring plot, you may turn away disappointed. You may read halfway through the book and not encounter more than one or two of the events mentioned in the reviews.
What is it, then, that makes A Fringe a five-star read? Why do many readers across the globe claim it to be one of Patrick Whites most brilliant works?
This is not, in fact, merely a story of adventure and excitement. Its a mission of humanity. Ellen Roxburgh is the image of any individual with conflicting views of life within herself. This is not a story of rescue, but one of survival. It reminds us all of our own personal inner struggles and how much we have been able to overcome. It is a reminder that the loss of innocence in every child is the first step in that childs becoming an adult.
A Fringe is also an anthem of cross-culturalism that sings true today in America, though it was set in 19th century Australia. Living here, we have all acquired or developed a certain social standard unfamiliar to our infant natures. From living among many legions of immigrants, or even from traveling abroad, we know what it is to subscribe to other social standards. A Fringe explores the effects of such an initiation in Ellen Roxburghs character. This initiation is exhibited as the cause of her internal conflict of social behaviors. She began as a Cornish farmers daughter, and then developed a façade of proper civilized mannerisms when she married her aristocratic husband. She initiated another set of social standards when she was forced to live among the aborigines. Whites moving depiction of this struggle will inspire and comfort the patient reader.
Patrick Whites A Fringe of Leaves may not satisfy an impatient adventurer. But it surpasses its acclaim of literary merit in its brilliant demonstration of timeless humanity and cross-cultural issues.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Upon unknown shores cast, September 18, 2001

By 

Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A Fringe of Leaves (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)

Patrick White writes like a castaway from the Victorian era. His novels are long and full of real characters and the society and civilization of which they are a part and from which they come is equally real. Each character possesses a fully developed history, and the story as a whole progress from one point to another. And in the process people are changed by the experience. If that sounds old fashioned to you, well, it is old fashioned but those are values that some readers miss and for those readers these novels. I don't want to make White sound too antiquated though for his themes are very contemporary ,or timeless, as his themes are those that don't go out of style. This is my favorite of his novels. In A Fringe of Leaves(c.1973) White tells a shipwreck story upon the shores of an as yet uncolonised Australia. The characters who survive the shipwreck are then captured by Aborigines and must adapt to a lifestyle quite unlike the one left behind in fair old England. White uses this tale to examine civilization first by showing his characters in it and then by showing his characters as they appear stripped of it.....in only a fringe of leaves. The examination is quite a thorough and engaging one. The novel feels Victorian partly because it is set in that time (or before) but it only retains the best of that periods use of the form. White himself is Australian(and one who has won many awards, Nobel included, and to many he is the best they have so far produced) and so his study of England is tinged with an insight reserved for the ousider or in his case the postcolonial. The shipwreck portion of the book is only about 150 pages or so near the end of a 500 page plus novel. It takes patience to get to the exciting part of the story but once you are there you will want to read that section more than once. In those blindingly intense pages the characters cling to but a few delicate and sacred strands of belief to keep the savage world from totally adopting them. The aftermath portion of the book is equally interesting.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Love! Hate! Survival!, September 30, 2009

By 

Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: A Fringe of Leaves (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)

What riper themes for a 'historical' novel? Patrick White's "A Fringe of Leaves" is exactly that, a historical romance set in Australia in the 1830s, when much of the country was as yet unconquered by its English and Irish settlers, a good number of whom were convicts. Fringe was first published in 1976, but in many ways it reads as a late-Victorian novel. There's a tremendous amount of Thomas Hardy about it, in subject matter, in narrative structure, and in its bitter-to-bittersweet outlook on humankind. The central tale of romance, between a strong-bodied young woman and a bookish older man, has echoes of George Eliot's Middlemarch -- intentional, I think -- and the survival tale that emerges as the second half of the novel, after a shipwreck, reminds me inexorably of Joseph Conrad. Then, when the heroine is 'adopted' unwillingly into non-European culture, I can't help thinking of E. M. Forster's "Passage to India". Forster's and White's uneasy attitudes toward erotic encounters are of a kind.

But Patrick White was his own man as a writer, and had his own very recognizable narrative voice. He mixed crisply evocative scenic descriptions with almost parenthetical wit and irony. His persistent tone of surly superciliousness toward his own characters,his creatures of imagination, may require a breaking-in period for many readers. I was strongly 'put off' by it when I read "Voss", my first encounter with White. However, in "Fringe of Leaves" the author created a compelling female character, Ellen Roxburgh, of more persuasive reality than almost any other heroine in fiction portrayed by authors of any gender persuasion. Mrs. Roxburgh is the survivor, and the horrors she survives would seem impossible except that they are utterly true to history, very similar to the accounts of the sufferings of the real-life American Captain James Riley, a shipwreck castaway enslaved by Bedouins in the Sahara in the early 1800s.

As I've already suggested, this is a novel with two halves -- the first a story of love and guilt among the Anglophone settlers, and the second a grueling narrative of captivity and escape -- but the two halves are jointed together masterfully by a shipwreck scene worthy of Conrad or Melville. And then there's an ending... the most unexpected, puzzling, ironic ending/non-ending one could ask for, the kind of ending that first makes you want to heave the book into the surf but then compels you to acknowledge it as the only thing plausible.

This is a "page-turner", whatever other impression of difficult earnestness I may have suggested. It would be possible, for a less compulsively analytic reader, to 'go with the flow' of passions and pangs, and to read "A Fringe of Leaves" as a flaming romance. Whatever sort of reader you are, give it a shot! It's perhaps the best 19th Century novel written in our lifetimes.