That reminds me of Olive C. McGavern. She was my eighth grade English teacher. Olive C. wore a black velvet choker presumably to hide the wrinkles in her neck.

She taught me to hate George Eliot and to love Shakespeare. We read Silas Marner and Taming of the Shrew. Her emphasis on remembering all the details of the plot rather than treating the broader themes made me loathe Eppie, the golden haired angel child. It wasn't until my sixties when I picked up Middlemarch in a bookshop in London and got interested in it. Since then I have read all the Eliot novels and appreciate her work.

With Shakespeare it was a different matter. Olive C, was a prude who was apparently aware of the double entendres in Shakespeare. This is the sort of thing she would do. Sally, you read until line 110. Johnny you pick up at line 140. I wrote down the numbers of the skipped lines and tried to puzzle out the meaning of the skipped lines. In doing so I not only picked up the entendre but got to appreciate the rhythm of the lines that I scanned. Later Shakespeare's Bawdy by Eric Partridge came out. That's an exhaustive treatment of Bill's sexual allusions. Anyhow WS is still good reading.

If it hadn't been for Jane Austen and Judith Wright, I think I would have jumped screaming out of the nearest classroom window. As a schoolgirl in the 70s, desperate for women's stories to mirror my own reality, there was just so much boys-own 'band of brothers' and 'let's all be lads in the bush together' propaganda that I was willing to cop from the English syllabus.

One thing I did like about Jane Austen was that all her heroines were actually alive at the end of the novel. Virtually every other novel I studied at school and at university, written by men of course, seemed to take a morbid pleasure in throwing women under trains, wasting them away with consumption, drowning them in lakes or dooming them to the death by agonising childbirth.

But mostly JA's brilliance lay in the way she could squeeze so much of the human condition into lives in which hardly anything ever seemed to happen - which, for a genteel woman of the early 19th century, was the sad reality.

Don, I absolutely agree with you about university study of English literature (in my day) taking all the joy out of it. What destroyed it for me was the tedious nitpicking at details of content accompanied by over-intellectualisation about what it meant, particularly the "hidden" or symbolic meanings which if they were lacking, had to be concocted. Like you I did English and History honours at school, having not been discouraged by my second year at Cheltenham Girls High School where I was taught by "Mrs Gregson" (Thea Astley). In Mrs Gregson's class all the high marks went to the girls who played to her liking for the longest and most erudite of words (surprise, surprise), while ignoring any gift for expression evidenced in an easy flow of words. I got 1st class in English and in 1966 commenced a double major at Sydney Uni with the intention of becoming a teacher. I endured only one year of English, and substituted Education as my second "teaching" subject from second year on. Education as a separate subject was not available in the '50s. My ensuing study of what engages children in reading to begin with was a world away from the stilted and pretentious way it was being taught at university at the time. I hope the tertiary study of literature has improved since then, including through your efforts.

I was an editor of 'Social Alternatives' a publication put out by a department in the University of Queensland. Occasionally we would get a submission from an Aborigine. They were usually compelling having transferred their oral culture to writing. I remember Marcia Langton's expressive writing. One submission was from an Aborigine doing graduate study in English literature - turgid, lifeless academic prose. He learned the style.