The novelist and short story writer Jessica Anderson was born in Queensland in 1916. She moved to Sydney at the age of eighteen, and apart from two and a half years in London, she has lived there all her adult life. Queensland and Sydney provide major literary settings for her work as she explores the significance of place in shaping individual and national identity while delineating nuances of social class and economic circumstance. Anderson also defines Australian life in relation to the social and cultural milieu of Britain and Europe, with her short story “Outdoor Friends” a particularly good example of this.

In her early Sydney years, Anderson published short stories under a pseudonym and wrote radio plays. She lat

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First published 18 May 2005

Citation: Jones, Dorothy. "Jessica Anderson". The Literary Encyclopedia. 18 May 2005.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=110, accessed 21 November 2009.]