About Eden

For Eden Liddelow life is language. Fascinated from an early age by English literature, she also wrote poetry in an invented language at 9 years old. At 10 she published her first poetry in English. Enchantment with sound at that age also involved composing music at the piano. Then came a satirical Wild West comic strip and a book of comic short stories, both unfortunately lost later in a house fire. Learning French poetry took the language fascination further and broadened imaginative horizons. From French too came surrealism, which has informed all her short fiction, notably her collection Metal Detecting. The seductions of the French language would take her into the translation of three books – one on social psychology (taken up by the NSW Police Department) one by a noted Parisian columnist, and one on religion and philosophy. For further immersion in the language and culture she acquired a house in southern France. Her critical books have all involved some analysis of French fiction and ideas.

The language of literature, often called stylistics, was the subject of her doctoral thesis, which examined rates of textual cohesion in the novels of Henry James and Samuel Beckett, and what these data can tell us about modernist thinking and modern life. The language of Kleinian psychoanalytic theory featured in her first critical book After Electra: rage, grief and hope in twentieth-century women’s fiction. Her four early novels, We Two Alone, The Quarantine Station, Flutter and The Bird Hide all feature particular, often strange patterns of language, sometimes drawn from literature, which haunt one or more of the characters. 

The other preoccupation in her writing is the interaction of politics and philosophy across the West over the last hundred years. From Big Brother to Big Brother: nihilism and fiction in the age of screens examines the influence of Nietzschean nihilism in politics and literature since World War Two.  Gift and Demand: writing against annihilism follows on from there, showing how the progressive loss of Aristotelian mind and philia with the ascendancy of neoliberalism has led to a destructiveness unparalleled in recent times, culminating with Trump and the possible sacrifice of the planet itself. The dominance of screen culture is part of this annihilism; and literature shows, in its absolute privilege of being itself, the extent to which regard for being has been lost in a politics of libertarian supremacy now deeply invested in the screen and AI. 

Her later novel Unless a Grain of Wheat is concerned with both politics and language, in the sense that the politics of the Arab Spring and the interaction of Muslim and Anglo characters is interpenetrated by the role of the subjunctive, a linguistic category found less in English than in French, but still something wonderful. Eden’s current work in progress, the Gold trilogy, is a departure, examining the allure and provenance of gold from the earliest times.

Eden lives in Melbourne and France with her partner Graham. She plays the piano, sings in choirs, and watches birds (which are the characters in her novel The Garden). Involved for many years in party and community politics, she chaired for some years the Victorian Advisory Council of the ABC. She suffers from the rare condition Whipple’s Disease, which is now manageable.