Amy Witting
| Amy Witting | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Joan Austral Fraser 26 January 1918 Sydney |
| Died | 18 September 2001 (aged 83) Sydney |
| Cause of death | Cancer |
| Other names |
De Guesclin, Joan Austral Levick |
| Occupation | Novelist, poet and teacher |
| Spouse(s) | Les Levick |
| Children | Gregory Levick |
| Website | Amy Witting website |
De Guesclin,
Amy Witting (26 January 1918 – 18 September 2001) was the pen name of an Australian novelist and poet born Joan Austral Fraser. She was widely acknowledged as one of Australia's "finest fiction writers, whose work was full of the atmosphere and colour or times past".
Amy Witting was born in the Sydney suburb of Annandale, and was brought up as a Catholic. She has "melancholy memories of a repressive family life" and remembered the nuns at her school, St Brendan's College, as being "obsessed with the torments of hell". She suffered from tuberculosis as a child.
She went to Fort Street Girls' High School. She studied languages at the University of Sydney where she met, among others, James McAuley, Harold Stewart and Dorothy Auchterlonie. Subsequently she gained a Diploma of Education at Teachers College and became a school teacher. Her tuberculosis recurred in her early adulthood, resulting in her spending time in a sanitorium which "gave her, for a time, the peace and solitude she always craved".
On 28 July 1934, when Witting was 16, one of her poems, written under the pseudonym De Guesclin, was published in the Sydney Morning Herald. Witting always wrote under a pseudonym. Her name, Amy Witting, is from a promise she made to herself to "never give up on consciousness', not be unwitting, but to always remain 'witting'".
Witting married Les Levick, a fellow high school teacher, in 1948, and they had one son. Greg. She continued to write until her death, dying of cancer a few weeks after the publication of After Cynthia, her last novel, in 2001.
For most of her working life, teaching English and French, and making a living took priority and writing was done only in her spare time. Already established Australian writer Thea Astley, who taught with Witting at Cheltenham Girls High School, was impressed by one of her stories, Goodbye, Ady, Goodbye, Joe, and encouraged her to submit it for publication. It was published in The New Yorker in April 1965. Indeed, the poet Kenneth Slessor told Thea Astley to "tell that women I'll publish any word she writes".
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