This autofictional novel is one of those unusual books that one likes and respects immediately. De Kretser is a master of the sentence. Also, therein, she provides the rare gift of expressing a problem simply while retaining its complexity. That is, the difficulty of loving a figure such as Virginia Woolf, while also coming to terms with her snobbery. I remember, distinctly, recognising in the characters of Charles Tansley and Miss Kilman an uncomfortable affinity. I, too, as a mere Mick with inelegant social graces, would have been dismissed by Woolf. I too was sufficiently ill-bred to be proud of my achievements; I was occasionally over-zealous in trying to prove my intellect; I continue to feel a natural distaste for the wealthy.

In Theory & Practice, along with her account of life as a graduate student in Melbourne in the 1980s (in which she exists in that secret, dark space between theory and practice, between the projected ideal and reality), de Kretser considers how we, as Woolf claimed, “live through our mothers”. She does this by recounting and contrasting her relationship with her cultural (theoretical) mother, Woolf, and her own (practical) mother. Both relationships are flawed, painful and defined by distance as well as love. With her own mother, de Kretser describes that familiar dynamic that can arise between parents and the children for whom they wanted a better life. Those children, thusly educated and cultured, must then bridge their way back to the world of those same parents, sometimes with immense difficulty. Contrastingly, with Woolf, Krester sums the situation up as follows:

The Woolfmother outed herself as a snob and a racist and an antisemite, failing us because mothers are obliged to fail. But her writing about women inspired us and gave us courage because our imaginations were bigger than hers. Our imaginations projected us into sentences intended for upper-middle-class Englishwomen.

In other words, de Kretser argues that we can take the shortcomings of our literary parents, or the distances that develop between generations, and transcend them. This is our glorious, almost unimaginably liberating right – to forgive, learn and improve, rather than choose to be offended, which is small-minded and worse, fruitless. While not perfect, this book is truly elegant, its tone one of generous curiosity.