Yasmine Gooneratne: Jane Austen, Australia and Sri Lanka

Abstract

In 1967, when she was a lecturer in English at the University of Ceylon, Yasmine Gooneratne (1935–2024) wrote an article on English literature in Ceylon for an English journal. Three years later, Gooneratne’s study of Jane Austen was published in Cambridge University Press’s ‘British Authors: Introductory Critical Studies’ series. In 1972, she moved to Australia with her husband, Brendon. Although by this time she had published two volumes of poetry, her first novel, A Change of Skies, was not published until 1991. It concerns a Sri Lankan linguistics academic who moves to Australia with his wife, and the adjustments they have to make to Australian ways. Since then, she published two more novels, The Pleasures of Conquest (1996) and The Sweet and Simple Kind (2009). In this paper I will attempt to draw together these three coordinates in Gooneratne’s career: English literature, especially Jane Austen; Australia; and Sri Lanka. What did Gooneratne learn, as a novelist, from her study of Austen? How did her time in Australia influence her as a novelist? And how did she negotiate the difficulties she identified in her fellow Sri Lankan writers?

Yasmine Gooneratne, literary scholar, novelist and poet, was born in Sri Lanka in 1935, was educated there and at Cambridge, and moved to Sydney in 1972. She taught at Macquarie University for many years and has published more than 20 books and many essays and articles. Although she was already ‘a published poet and fiction writer’, she decided not to try to publish creative work when she came to Australia, ‘having convinced myself that I was unlikely to find readers here’ (Gooneratne 1996a, p. 55). But she found to her surprise when she did start writing fiction in the late 1980s that readers appreciated her work and encouraged her to write more. She attributed this partly to changes in the Australian literary scene: ‘I find it very encouraging,’ she wrote in 1996, ‘to be part of a culture that seems at long last to be developing its own distinctive literary identity’ (Gooneratne 1996a, p. 55). In the author bio at the front of her second novel, The Pleasures of Conquest, published in 1996, we are told that she ‘combines the professions of educator, literary critic, editor and bibliographer with the subversive pleasures of writing poetry, fiction and satire’ (Gooneratne 1996b, front matter, n.p.).

Gooneratne was a transnational writer in almost every imaginable sense of the term. She was a Sri Lankan who studied at Cambridge University. She brought her unique perspective to the major works of English literature, including the novels and juvenilia of Jane Austen as well as Alexander Pope and Leonard Woolf. She was a South Asian academic who taught English literature in Australia for decades and was Patron of the Jane Austen Society of Australia. But she also made significant contributions to the field of postcolonial literary studies during its formative years in the 1970s and 1980s and beyond, founding the Centre for Post Colonial Literature and Language Studies at Macquarie University, and writing for important journals such as the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, World Literature Written in English and CRNLE Reviews Journal. She received an honorary D.Litt. from Macquarie University and was awarded Australia’s highest national honour, the Order of Australia, in 1990, for her services to education and literature. In 2002, she was awarded the Raja Rao Award, an Indian prize recognising significant contributions to South Asian diasporic literature. She reached across national borders through her career, making new connections and bringing new perspectives to literatures in English in Britain, Australia, India and Sri Lanka. Her own creative work deals with themes of migration and multi-national identity: the challenges and rewards of being a newcomer to a society rife with unthinking racial stereotypes, and then returning to her home country and viewing it afresh with the benefit of the new understanding gained from her experiences.

Sri Lanka has of course always been a part of Gooneratne’s literary world. As a scholar she did extensive and impressive research on the cultural and literary history of Ceylon, and her three novels all approach Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans in different ways. Her most Australian novel is her first, A Change of Skies, published in 1991, which concerns the migration of a Sri Lankan academic and his wife to Sydney.

In a 1967 essay on the history of creative writers in Ceylon, Gooneratne praised the nineteenth-century writer William Knighton who, she wrote, successfully blended ‘the best elements of two rich cultural traditions’ (Gooneratne 1967, p. 138), the British and the Ceylonese. Gooneratne surely saw herself in this tradition, and the British writer she admired most profoundly is Jane Austen, who, she said in a 1994 interview, provided her ‘with an ideal of good and responsible writing’ (Rama [1994] 2019, p. 4). In her 1970 book on Austen, Gooneratne talks about Austen’s ‘development through and out of literary satire to the more complex and difficult task of depicting real life’ (Gooneratne 1970, p. 34). Gooneratne did not fall into the trap of attempting to imitate Austen, though. None of her three novels resembles any of Austen’s six in any significant way. In the 1994 interview with R.P. Rama (which I will refer to frequently in what follows) Gooneratne talked of her admiration for the German-born British American novelist and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927–2013), who lived in India for many years:

Ruth Jhabvala deals with tragic problems through comedy and humour, she makes serious points in an amusing way. Also, while studying her early novels I learned very quickly that she had used Jane Austen for her own purpose: her first novel, Amrita, is clearly Mansfield Park in an Indian setting. So I may have recognized in her work certain technical possibilities that carried a message for me.

(Rama [1994] 2019, p. 5)

Gooneratne first met Jhabvala in Delhi in 1977 and was rather overawed by her. ‘Jane Austen must surely have been rather like that: quiet, observant, saying little. But that little would be loaded with secret ironies’ (Gooneratne 2000, p. 48). Austen and Jhabvala are two stars in Gooneratne’s literary firmament, others she mentioned being Alexander Pope, RK Narayan and VS Naipaul. ‘I suppose there is some significance in the fact that the writers I admire most are serious writers with a highly developed sense of comedy,’ she told Rama ([1994] 2019, p. 4). Sneja Gunew notes her use of satire in A Change of Skies to explore ‘the various ways in which Asian immigrants were exposed to particular forms of racism both in the nineteenth century and the latter part of the twentieth century’ but adds that ‘her satiric force is as trenchantly directed toward the prejudices she encounters within the diasporic community itself’. Gunew goes on to say that it ‘helps to know that Gooneratne is the Patron of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, since her approach to social satire via the status of women and their confinement to domestic relations informs her writing style to great effect’ (Gunew 2009, p. 41). However, Austen’s influence on Gooneratne’s fiction, though pervasive, is subtle.

Gooneratne was presumably invited to be the patron of JASA because of her academic work on Austen. She mentioned the invitation as one ‘of the very nicest things that have happened to me—of a literary kind’ (Rama [1994] 2019, p. 4). The other was the chance to write the book on Austen for Cambridge University Press’s Introductory Critical Series. The book was published in 1970. It is, as the series title implies, a survey of Austen’s novels aimed at students and ‘a wide public’ (Mayhead 1970). However, it is far from the ‘plain vanilla’ reader’s guide we might expect. Gooneratne brought her own perceptions and perspectives to this interesting reading of Austen, and luckily she to a large extent ignored the pronouncement of the series editor, Robin Mayhead, that ‘Great literature is taken to be to a large extent self-explanatory to the reader who will attend carefully enough to what it says. “Background” study, whether biographical or historical, is not the concern of this series’ (Mayhead 1970). As Alastair Niven points out, Gooneratne has always been an ‘historically inclined … critic’ (Niven 1981, p. 33). Already on the second page of the Austen book, quietly undermining Mayhead’s sweeping assertion, Gooneratne wrote that ‘a reader of [Austen’s] novels today could probably not, without some specialised information, estimate Sir Thomas [Bertram’s] income at all accurately’. Sir Thomas is the patriarch of the family in Austen’s novel Mansfield Park. It is important for the reader to understand that he is moderately wealthy but not rich enough to be unconcerned about money. Various financial worries and pressures within the family are important in the plot, although they are not always clearly explained, because Austen would have assumed a shared socio-cultural knowledge in her contemporary readers. Gooneratne continued,

The world we know well, whether Ghanaian, Canadian, or Ceylonese, is very different from the world [Austen] knew, in externals at least. The social customs she takes for granted are so different from those obtaining even in Britain today that British readers might feel, quite as much as those of any other country or nation, that the fluctuations of the Huntingdon marriage market as described in the [opening paragraph of Mansfield Park] have nothing to do with them.

(Gooneratne 1970, p. 2)

In her introduction, she talked of Austen’s ‘tone … exquisitely poised between ironic detachment and protest at the immorality and injustice of accepted social values’ (Gooneratne 1970, p. 7), as well as the ‘brisk precision with which she destroys romantic preconceptions’ (Gooneratne 1970, p. 33) in the teenage work Frederic and Elfrida, seeing it as an implied criticism aimed ‘at the irresponsible writer who projects false and overstrained ideas’ (Gooneratne 1970, p. 32).

Austen created three manuscript volumes of her youthful writings when she was in her mid-teens. The pieces vary in form and length—there are short stories and sketches, plays and some poems, and a parody ‘History of England’. What most of them share is a lively, anarchic tone and a strong sense of the absurd. She uses parody and slapstick comedy to poke fun at established literary and other cultural forms, and especially at the kind of false sentimentality that was ubiquitous in popular novels of the period. Gooneratne was one of the earliest critics to study the juvenilia seriously. Even in these youthful works, she sees in Austen ‘a steady determination to see and present life in true perspective [which] gives a moral strength to Austen’s earliest satires at the expense of romanticism and sentimentality’ (Gooneratne 1970, p. 33). ‘The unreal relationships of the sentimental novel are traced directly to their origins in selfishness, and when put to the test of normal social behaviour are found to be both comic and offensive’ (Gooneratne 1970, p. 35).

This kind of insight feeds into Gooneratne’s satirical strategy in an early story, ‘How Barry Changed his Image’, published in Meanjin in 1989. Gooneratne described her approach in the Rama interview: ‘I felt that if my innocently insular, unconsciously racist Asian characters were to come up against fictional Australians who were racist themselves, largely due to their own colonial hang-ups, maybe they’d cancel each other out’ (Rama [1994] 2019, p. 3). This story was well-received and Gooneratne developed it into A Change of Skies. In A Change of Skies, there is a hilarious episode where Navaranjini—recently renamed Jean—decides to put her new knowledge of the Australian language into practice in an encounter with the controversial sociologist Ronald Blackstone, who has broadcast racist comments about Asians failing to assimilate. The unwary Blackstone offers Jean a sausage roll at a barbeque:

‘You have the impudence to offer me a sausage roll, you ignorant, non-vegetarian racist? I am a Tamil, Professor Blackstone, and a Hindu. Pure veg, and proud of it. What do you take me for? A pork-eating Ching-Chong?’

And then I remembered the new words I’d learned from representative Australians on talk-back radio, and added, ‘A slit-eyed slope-head?’

The barbarian I was addressing seemed to emerge from a deep trance. ‘Madam,’ he said. ‘You call me a racist. I am forced to tell you this: You, madam, have put me completely to shame.’

Well. I’ll admit I was stunned. He’d said he was ashamed! And he’d apologised, just like that! Which just shows you mustn’t judge people too hastily. As I told Barry in the car going home that evening, this experience showed that Australians can be civilised. If you go about it tactfully.

(Gooneratne 1991, pp. 128–29)

The episode doesn’t finish there—Jean goes on to tell the bemused Blackstone that she hopes his chooks turn into emus and kick his flaming dunny down. The humour, which relies on the reader having an understanding of the Australian vernacular of the time, comes not only from Jean’s naïve use of these slang expressions, which would now be considered offensive and even then were insulting to East Asian people, but also from her misunderstanding of Blackstone’s rather sarcastic reproof of her as an apology and admission that he had behaved wrongly. This is a pretty clear illustration of Gooneratne’s strategy of cancelling out one racism with another, and the humour is broad and ridiculous, more in the style of Austen’s juvenilia than her novels; although we could also perhaps see parallels in some of Austen’s early novels: the naïve young Catherine Morland’s polite but uncomprehending deflection of the boorish John Thorpe’s marriage proposal in Northanger Abbey, or in the foppish Robert Ferrars’s ridiculous disquisition on his preference for cottages over every other style of residence in Sense and Sensibility.

But perhaps a more illuminating comparison might be made between Marianne Dashwood and Jean Mundy. Gooneratne said that as she worked on the novel which grew out of the short story,

I found that one of my characters—Jean—developed in what seemed to me a very remarkable way. In the short story she is a beautiful, rather vain air-head, an unreliable narrator, a butt for satire. But as the novel developed, she grew into a person with a mind and a heart, someone I could really believe in and respect.

(Rama [1994] 2019, p. 4)

I have often speculated that the same kind of process might have taken place as Austen wrote Sense and Sensibility). This novel was Austen’s first published work, the breakthrough she had been hoping for all her adult life, and an early draft, titled Elinor and Marianne, had been written much earlier, perhaps while she was still a teenager, not long after the juvenilia. The plot concerns the Dashwood family, a widow with three daughters who lose their home and are left virtually penniless when their father dies. Their poverty threatens to thwart the marriage prospects of the young women, and throughout the novel they both suffer the pain of losing (or believing they have lost) the men they love to other women. The title suggests a schematic work, in which the two older sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, embody the contrasting qualities of sense and sensibility. The eldest sister Elinor, on the face of it, is the sensible one. She keeps her emotions under control and presents a calm face to the world, although her suffering is great. Marianne seems at first ‘a butt for satire’ like Gooneratne’s Jean, the epitome of the standard eighteenth-century heroine of sensibility: she

would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby. She would have been ashamed to look her family in the face the next morning, had she not risen from her bed in more need of repose than when she lay down in it. … Her sensibility was potent enough!

(Austen [1811] 1933, p. 83)

However, even if Austen initially conceived of Marianne as a character whose principal function was to be a foil to the sensible Elinor, she soon developed beyond this stereotype into ‘a person with a mind and a heart’ (Rama [1994] 2019, p. 4). There is an equivalent, although not so marked, development in Elinor, from a rather stiff and prudish character to a young woman who both thinks rationally and feels deeply. However, in Marianne the stereotype is more extreme. Perhaps these exaggerations in Marianne’s character are traces from the early work ‘Elinor and Marianne’ which was completed in the 1790s, or possibly the character developed as the novel proceeded, almost of her own accord, like Jean in A Change of Skies.

This particular parallel does not imply overt influence, of course, and although as we have seen Gooneratne acknowledged Austen as an important role model, the narrative voices in A Change of Skies owe nothing to Austen. As Rama remarks in her interview, ‘your novel is different’ (Rama [1994] 2019, p. 5). The novel is a patchwork of first-person accounts, the main three narrators being Jean (or Navaranjini), her husband Bharat (or Barry Mundy) and Barry’s grandfather Edward, whose manuscript journal Barry edits for publication while in Australia. Edward travelled to Australia with a shipload of indentured labourers in 1882, although he was not indentured himself, and stayed in Australia for five years. Chapters are given archly amusing descriptive titles such as ‘Bharat observes the Customs of Southern Cross’ and ‘Navaranjini takes Note of Signs and Visions’. Extracts from Edward’s journal, including Barry’s commentary on it, are introduced alternately with first-person narrative by Jean and Barry, as well as letters written by both of them to their families back in Sri Lanka. These letters usually stand alone without commentary. Austen often includes letters in her novels, but they are always incorporated into the third-person narrative. The patchwork style allowed Gooneratne to imply ironies by means of juxtaposing the different voices of the characters, as well as the differences between their normal first-person narrative voices and the tone and style they adopt when writing letters to their relatives and friends. There is no surefooted omniscient narrator guiding the reader through the novel’s ironies, as is always the case with Austen’s novels—although not always with the juvenilia, in which first-person narrators and comic juxtapositions of contradictory voices are common.

The tone in the first two-thirds of A Change of Skies is slightly whimsical, and the contemporary couple, Barry and Jean, are innocent if unreliable narrators, viewing Australian society with a mixture of prejudice and bafflement. The young Edward, a century earlier, is more knowing but also displays his own biases. For example, reading a newspaper article about ‘coolies’ on the Queensland sugar plantations which conflated the Sinhalese and Chinese workers, he deplores the author’s ignorance, but adds, ‘I cannot blame him too much for it since I am well aware that similar prejudices exist in great strength among my own people; though there they exist, I do earnestly believe and sincerely hope, only among ignorant and ill-educated women’ (Gooneratne 1991, p. 75).

The whimsy dissipates when Barry and Jean return to Sri Lanka for a visit and see their homeland with new eyes. Jean notices that the Sri Lankan friend whom they know from Australia seems different among his own family. ‘I must admit I didn’t think Dasa’s sense of humour was quite as attractive in Sri Lanka as it had seemed to us in Australia. It appeared to me that his way of speaking had altered in some way since we had last met him in Sydney. … I wondered whether Barry and I spoke differently too, now, and whether the change applied to the way we thought as well as to the way we spoke’ (Gooneratne 1991, p. 257). This is a sign that Jean is becoming more self-aware on seeing Sri Lankan society from the new perspective provided by living away from the country for a period.

Barry takes on more of the narration in this later part of the novel. He ponders whether they have started to behave like expatriates: ‘Expats make scenes, expats complain about the food being “off” in expensive hotels, about faulty air conditioning, about the absence of toothpaste, about the dubious cleanliness of sheets, about the disgusting state of public lavatories. Expats make fools of themselves by losing their tempers’ (Gooneratne 1991, p. 262). His self-criticism is equivalent to Jean’s new understanding and shows that they are both growing in emotional maturity. But despite his attempt at forbearance, Barry is soon tried beyond endurance by an English visitor, Polly, ‘on her first trip “out east”’ (Gooneratne 1991, p. 268). This young woman declares that she has heard ‘Australia’s the pits … dull and boring, they say—how can you possibly stand it?’ She makes a comparison with ‘All this beauty, this culture, this history!’ Barry, who has been longing to be back in Sydney, away from the worsening violence, social disintegration and incompetence of Sri Lanka, is prompted to a reflection which is darker and more powerful than anything in the novel so far. ‘I thought then of the historic places of the earth, so often associated with a sad, secret memory of violence, so often reeking … with the blood of their native inhabitants.’ He mentions genocides in Europe, America, Africa, Sri Lanka, Australia. But out loud, to the gormless Polly, he merely says, ‘The “history” you’re sitting on … is a history of colonial occupation and international bullying. Picturesque as it is I find it quite easy to live without it’ (Gooneratne 1991, pp. 269–70).

It is interesting that this section of the book, perhaps the most deeply felt and serious passage, is in Barry’s voice rather than Jean’s. It is reminiscent of a passage in one of Gooneratne’s articles, ‘The English-Educated in Sri Lanka: an assessment of their cultural role’, published in 1992, a year after A Change of Skies. She was discussing a work by Tarzie Vittachi about the 1958 emergency which, he says, with rueful irony, ‘couldn’t happen in Ceylon’. Gooneratne explains that he is referring to

The arrival of the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: race-hate, historically embodied in the decimation of Tasmanian aborigines by British settlers; in the corralling of North American Indians into reservations; in the Jewish agony of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Belsen; and in the Hindu-Muslim massacres that accompanied the partition of India.

(Gooneratne 1972, p. 10)

In A Change of Skies, despite Jean’s development into ‘a person with a mind and a heart’, it is Barry who is the intellectual: he has the understanding and broad education necessary to make these connections. Gooneratne, although she herself shared this education and understanding, has for one reason or another decided to withhold it from her principal female character. I suspect, given her account of the evolution of the novel in the Rama interview, that it happened organically and was certainly not intentionally sexist—it is just not plausible for this particular character, Jean, in her rather winsome innocence, to be better informed than her academic husband.

Shermal Wijawardene claims that the fact Sri Lankan women of Gooneratne’s class were typically given a restricted and feminised education in the home led her to argue for ‘a private literary tradition, as well as her own place as a migrant woman writer in Australia as a consequence of it, by gradually divesting domestic/imaginative “inward space” of its sexual politics, and presenting it as the unique, private inheritance of the woman writer’ (Wijewardene 2004). I wonder whether she is arguing for it or presenting it as the way women made the best of their constricted lives in colonial Sri Lanka. Wijawardene draws mainly on the fictionalised memoir Relative Merits for her analysis of Gooneratne’s notion of a feminine, inward creativity, and does not mention the other novels. It is true that Jean is based in the home while her husband is more of a public figure. Perhaps there is a parallel in the fact that none of Austen’s heroines are writers: musicians, yes, and painters, but there is not a poet or novelist among them: they are all intelligent and reasonably well educated, but do not aspire to authorship. That career—or indeed any other—was simply too unlikely for women like Austen’s heroines. Nevertheless, Gooneratne observed to Rama that

Many Asian women who move away from their conservative societies to the West find, over the years, that they have developed a life and interests of their own. They have become individuals in their own right, and can no longer see themselves as having no existence outside being somebody’s daughter, wife or mother.

(Rama [1994] 2019, pp. 6, 7)

This is part of the bigger picture Gooneratne described in her article on English writers in Sri Lanka:

The fact that many active Sri Lankan writers had chosen [by the 1970s] to live outside Sri Lanka began inevitably to affect the literature itself. Not only did new writing in Sri Lanka begin to lose its provinciality and admit insights born of new kinds of experience, but at least as much creative/critical energy and scholarship began to be generated outside the country as in it.

(Gooneratne 1972, p. 21)

A Change of Skies makes some acute observations about the migrant experience, again mainly through Barry’s point of view. Contemplating his grandfather’s experience in comparison with his own, he concludes ‘that the invisibility offered to exiles by chance can bestow on us a freedom we may not have enjoyed “at home”. Until we choose where we shall settle, and decide (in our own time) to make ourselves known, displaced people such as ourselves enjoy a liberty that others may well envy’ (Gooneratne 1991, p. 281). This has intriguing echoes of a much earlier article of Gooneratne’s, ‘In Search of a Tradition: The Creative Writer in Ceylon’, written in 1967, while she was still on the staff of the University of Ceylon. She described the view of Ceylon and India in nineteenth-century English literature as ‘lands where the English personality abroad could attain greater breadth, free from the stifling, restricting influences exerted by the monotony of industrial life in cramped quarters’ (Gooneratne 1967, p. 135).

On the other hand, Barry realises the importance of the type of hindsight that recent immigrants cannot have: ‘we have only our hopes and our expectations. And those are quickly and easily dashed, in a world that has got on perfectly well without us before we arrived, and does not realise as quickly as we might wish, what it has gained by the lucky accident of our arrival’ (Gooneratne 1991, pp. 281–82). This nice phrase is perhaps one of the few truly Austenesque touches in a novel that is very much its own creation: a hybrid of Sri Lanka and Australia. Perhaps Gooneratne’s chief debt to Austen in this novel is not in any particulars of voice or details—despite little nods in her direction such as the Sri Lankan matron who, like Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, bridles at the thought that she (or her daughters) might have prepared a meal herself rather than employing servants to do so—but in the ‘ideal of good and responsible writing’ that led her to shape the novel not by slavish imitation but with a thoughtful and creative approach to the subject in hand. One might also note a similarity between Austen’s brilliant and amoral Lady Susan, in a short epistolary novel of that name written when she was about 18, and Gooneratne’s Stella Mallinson in The Pleasures of Conquest), a satirical tour de force set on the fictional island of Amnesia—a fictional Sri Lanka—in the Indian Ocean. Stella is an American popular writer and celebrity, bent on enhancing her image by patronising fashionable causes while enjoying the best that life has to offer. Lady Susan is not wealthy but is cynically manipulative, trying to organise her daughter’s life in her own best interests, and successfully scheming to marry a rich gentleman while continuing a relationship with her lover. These two characters share a feminine charm that masks a steely self-centred and opportunistic approach to life, although they are different enough to make deliberate intertextuality uncertain.

However, references to Austen abound in Gooneratne’s third novel, The Sweet and Simple Kind, a family saga set in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). Latha Wijesinha, an only child, belongs to a lesser branch of a rich and influential Sinhalese family. Her father is an honest public servant, with a modest income and a happy, if rather cynical, disposition—very much in the same vein as Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. The Bennet family, like the Dashwood family in Sense and Sensibility and the Bertrams in Mansfield Park, are placed firmly by Austen in a particular economic and social situation. The Bennets are comfortably off, but there is a problem: Mr Bennet’s property is entailed on the male line—meaning that the estate must go to his nearest male relative when he dies. He and Mrs Bennet have five daughters and no sons. The nearest male relative, who is to inherit, is a comically self-important clergyman. Given this inequitable but very common predicament, the future financial security of the women of the family depends on their marrying well, while having little to offer in the way of dowries to prospective husbands. The novel famously charts the fortunes of the two eldest Bennet daughters as they negotiate this invidious situation, with their mother embarrassing them with her blatant attempts at matchmaking.

In The Sweet and Simple Kind, Latha studies Austen at the University of Ceylon, but she has already devoured the novels, along with the other classics of English literature, during her childhood. She is the one rather wishfully referred to by her mother and aunts as ‘the sweet and simple kind’, and hers is the character that seems to follow most closely Gooneratne’s own history. Gunew notes,

As was the case with Gooneratne’s own upbringing, neither Latha nor Tsunami [her cousin] is encouraged to seek any learning beyond their socialization to be competent wives and mothers. Though both manage to acquire a post-secondary education, this achievement does not necessarily strengthen their right to make choices concerning their own lives.

(Gunew 2009, p. 42)

This fact makes it all the more remarkable that Gooneratne was by 1981 regarded as ‘a leading Commonwealth literary critic’ who ‘applies a first-class acuity to everything she reads’ (Niven 1981, pp. 32, 33).

Latha’s cousin, Tsunami, is the daughter of Rowland Wijesinha, from the wealthy branch of the family. Her tempestuous nature is reflected in her name. The girls spend childhood holidays together at the family’s country estate, with Tsunami’s sister and three brothers. As they grow up, Ceylon attains independence, the Sinhala nationalist movement gains power, and racial violence against the Tamils and other minorities begins. The Wijesinha family are Sinhalese conservatives, but they have a Tamil connection: Rowland’s first wife, and the mother of his five children, was not only a Tamil, but an Indian: unthinkable within the rigid marriage conventions of the times. As Latha’s generation comes of age, questions of marriage are very much in contention. Tsunami, like her father and like Fanny Price’s mother in Mansfield Park, marries ‘to disoblige her family’ (Austen [1814] 1934, p. 3), while Soma, Latha’s mother, like Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, concentrates much energy on trying to arrange a suitable marriage for her daughter, despite her unfortunate intellectual ambitions. Latha defies her mother and, like Gooneratne herself, pursues postgraduate studies at Cambridge.

However, despite the explicit Austen references in this later work, it is nothing like an Austen novel. The sweep is broad, and the political context explicit, while Austen’s novels focus on individuals and families and the background information is often left unstated or merely hinted at. This difference is partly an aesthetic choice, but it could also be attributed to their intended, or expected, readerships. Austen was writing mainly for an English audience, and would, I feel sure, be astonished at her world-wide fame in the twenty-first century. She has become a transnational writer despite herself, translated in to many languages, adapted into films set in societies as different as California (Clueless, based on Emma) and India (Bride and Prejudice), and spawning a bewildering variety of ‘fan fiction’ in many different genres. Gooneratne, on the other hand, knew from the start that she was writing for a transnational audience. Her first novel was explicitly transnational, dealing with Sri Lankan immigrants in Australia, and her subsequent writings have expanded further afield, with American characters visiting the Indian Ocean, and Sri Lankan characters studying in the UK.

Walter Perera writes, ‘Sri Lankan expatriate writers on the whole retain their artistic verve, present a plethora of voices and continually “return” to the island for artistic inspiration’ (Perera 2000, p. 59). This is certainly true of Gooneratne, and she literally ‘returned to the island’ in her retirement, dying there in February 2024 in her late eighties. Nevertheless, it is interesting that Gooneratne said she ‘couldn’t have written fiction if I had not been a teacher of literature’ (Rama [1994] 2019, p. 8). This implies that she drew from life not directly but via literature. In fact, she consciously looked in Australian literature for ‘prototypes of Asian Australians that could be used as models for convincing fictional characters’ when she was writing A Change of Skies, but ‘could find none’ (Gooneratne 1996a): she had to find her own way of creating her idiosyncratic characters and placing them in their very specific and unprecedented circumstances. This calls to mind something she observed about Austen in her 1970 book: ‘Despite the outward poise of her manner, the reader feels sometimes that Jane Austen is clinging to her ideals rather than calmly stating them, and that the final triumphs of her heroines are so many challenges to a hostile society’ (Gooneratne 1970, p. 43). The slightly desperate poise of the outsider is perhaps what Gooneratne and Austen have in common, and although Gooneratne had reasons to feel somewhat alienated even in her own country before coming to Australia, that move provided new insights: when, as her character Barry Mundy says, ‘the experience of exile opened our eyes to worlds beyond the limits of our education’ (Gooneratne 1991, p. 285). Both writers were in uncharted territory, determined to overcome the challenges faced by all writers who aspire to represent their authentic vision of the world unflinchingly, although one never left the southern counties of England and the other travelled the world.

Yasmine Gooneratne is perhaps not well known internationally today, although in Australia academia, and among the scholars of post-colonial literature worldwide, she is remembered as a brilliant and wide-ranging writer. She died in February 2024, only days before I presented a paper on her work at a university in Guntur in India, where other delegates were also mourning her loss and remembering her life and work. Her work on Jane Austen can still provide useful insights, and her own novels are clever and extremely readable in their own right.