Barnard, Marjorie, 1897-1987.
The persimmon tree and other stories / by Marjorie Barnard. (Sydney : Clarendon Publishing Co., 1943)
This volume shows the quality constraints war-time placed on local publishing efforts. This was Barnard’s only collection of short stories to appear in her lifetime and it represents some of her best work. The title story, ‘The Persimmon Tree’, remains one of the most frequently anthologised short stories of the period. A number of stories in the collection deal with the dramas of marital infidelity, love triangles and the challenges facing women endeavouring to do ‘the right thing’. Several of these stories reflect aspects of Barnard’s own secret love affair with fellow-writer, Frank Dalby Davison.
