Eve Langleys editor, the famous Beatrice Davis, declared that the personal side of Eves life was coloured with madly poetic aberrations that would make any biographer pale if he wanted to get to the facts. For 20 years, Helen Vines has trawled the archives to establish what most have viewed as an impossible task: separating the facts from the fiction of Eve Langleys life. Helen is a writer and editor who has been published in industry, education and union journals including Australian Educator and HR Monthly. Her first published creative essay was in Island Magazine and she co-authored Status and Reward: The History of Industrial Representation of Professional Engineers in Australia 19461996 with Brian Lloyd. Helen was raised on a farm in Drumborg, deep in the Western District of Victoria. She attended Heywood High School and Hamilton College, took an Honours Arts degree and Diploma of Education at the University of Melbourne, and an MA and PhD at the University of Tasmania. She has raised three wonderful children.
Eve Langley's strange story, in all its contradictory versions, its secrets and silences, has baffled many literary sleuths. Helen Vines disentangles facts from fantasies with patience and sensitivity. The author of that much-loved story of outback Australia The Pea Pickers emerges as a tragically flawed yet resilient writer whose distinctive talents came to being within a tempestuous life. -- Brenda Niall Such skilful literary detective work. Helen Vines untangles fact and fiction in her search for the truth about Eve Langley, one of twentieth-century Australia's most astonishing and misunderstood writers. This sensitive biography teases apart the myths surrounding a writer who never escaped the complicated legacy of her dazzling first novel. In doing so, Eve Langley and The Pea Pickers furthers our understanding of the relationship between family trauma, mental illness and creativity. -- Cathy Perkins