This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.
"A 50th-anniversary edition of the haunting novel about the disappearance of three boarding school girls that inspired the acclaimed film--featuring a foreword by Maile Meloy, author of Do Not Become Alarmed It was a cloudless summer day in the year 1900. Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of the secluded volcanic outcropping. Farther, higher, until at last they disappeared. They never returned. Mysterious and subtly erotic, Picnic at Hanging Rock inspired the iconic 1975 film of the same name by Peter Weir. A beguiling landmark of Australian literature, it stands with Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, and Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides as a masterpiece of intrigue"--… (more)
I enjoyed this novel thoroughly. Many years ago I saw the film and was fascinated by it; the book is even better.
Three South Australian private school girls and their math teacher disappear on a special outing to Hanging Rock in February of 1900. I have never been to Australia, but Lindsay manages to evoke a great feeling of geographical isolation in the bush, as well as helplessness in a world before mobile phones and search and rescue helicopters.
I was startled to find that the main crisis of the story - the disappearances - happened so early in the novel and genuinely wondered how Lindsay was going to keep me interested for the rest of the book. I needn't have worried. Lindsay's striking characterizations, particularly of the headmistress, and her gift for atmosphere kept me hanging on until the last page.
This is a book I recommend most highly. It is unusual, creepy, and extremely well written, and will stay with you long after you put the book down. ( )
While it dragged for me a bit in the second act, there's no doubt that this is a true classic. While set in Edwardian Australia, the book also reads like an Edwardian novel. It's like E.M. Forster by way of Lovecraft. ( )
Everyone agreed that the day was just right for the picnic to Hanging Rock—a shimmering summer morning warm and still, with cicadas shrilling all through breakfast from the loquat trees outside the dining room windows and bees murmuring above the pansies bordering the drive.
Quotations
Miranda!
As always, in matters of surpassing human interest, those who knew nothing whatever either at first or even second hand were the most emphatic in expressing their opinions; which are well known to have a way of turning into established facts overnight.
Hatless and trembling with suppressed fury Reg stood alone in the hall. Here, in an agony of frustrated oratory and punctured self-esteem, he was obliged to pass the time as best he could, on a high-backed mahogany chair, devising ways and means of retrieving his hat from the study without loss of face.
She sat staring at the heavy curtains that shut out the gentle twilit garden, thinking how few things in life were unmuddled, firmly outlined as they were surely intended to be? One could organize, direct, plan each hour in advance and still the muddle persisted. Nothing in life was really watertight, nothing secret, nothing secure.
At every step the prospect ahead grew more enchanting with added detail of crenellated crags and lichen-patterned stone. Now a mountain laurel glossy above the dogwood's dusty silver leaves, now a dark slit between two rocks where maidenhair fern trembled like green lace. 'Well, at least let us see what it looks like over this first little rise,' said Irma, gathering up her voluminous skirts. 'Whoever invented female fashions for nineteen hundred should be made to walk through bracken fern in three layers of petticoats.' The bracken soon gave way to a belt of dense scratchy scrub ending in a waist-high shelf of rock. Miranda was first out of the scrub and kneeling on the rock to pull up the others with the expert assurance that Ben Hussey had admired this morning when she opened the gate.
Last words
Thus the College Mystery, like that of the celebrated case of the Marie Celeste, seems likely to remain forever unsolved.
"A 50th-anniversary edition of the haunting novel about the disappearance of three boarding school girls that inspired the acclaimed film--featuring a foreword by Maile Meloy, author of Do Not Become Alarmed It was a cloudless summer day in the year 1900. Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of the secluded volcanic outcropping. Farther, higher, until at last they disappeared. They never returned. Mysterious and subtly erotic, Picnic at Hanging Rock inspired the iconic 1975 film of the same name by Peter Weir. A beguiling landmark of Australian literature, it stands with Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, and Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides as a masterpiece of intrigue"--
▾Library descriptions
No library descriptions found.
▾LibraryThing members' description
Book description
On St. Valentine's Day in 1900 a party of schoolgirls went on a picnic to Hanging Rock. Some were never to return...
Picnic at Hanging Rock centers around a trip by a party of girls from Appleyard College, a fictitious upper class private boarding school, who travel to Hanging Rock in the Mount Macedon area, Victoria, for a picnic on St. Valentine's Day in 1900. The excursion ends in tragedy when three of the girls, and later one of their teachers, mysteriously vanish while climbing the rock. No reason for their disappearance is ever given, and one of the missing girls who is later found has no memory of what has happened to her companions. A fourth girl who also climbed the rock with the group is of little help in solving the mystery, having returned in hysterics for reasons she cannot explain.
The disappearances provoke much local concern and international sensation with sexual molestation, abduction and murder being high on the list of possible outcomes. Several organized searches of the picnic grounds and the area surrounding the rock itself turn up nothing. Meanwhile the students, teachers and staff of the college, as well as members of the community, grapple with the riddle-like events. A young man on a private search locates one of the missing girls, but is himself found in an unexplained daze — yet another victim of the rock. Concerned parents begin withdrawing their daughters from the formerly prestigious college and several of the staff, including the headmistress, either resign or meet with tragic ends. We are told that both the College, and the Woodend Police Station where records of the investigation were kept, are destroyed by fire shortly afterwards.
)
)
)
Google Books — Loading...
(3.77)
Wikipedia in English
1
Three South Australian private school girls and their math teacher disappear on a special outing to Hanging Rock in February of 1900. I have never been to Australia, but Lindsay manages to evoke a great feeling of geographical isolation in the bush, as well as helplessness in a world before mobile phones and search and rescue helicopters.
I was startled to find that the main crisis of the story - the disappearances - happened so early in the novel and genuinely wondered how Lindsay was going to keep me interested for the rest of the book. I needn't have worried. Lindsay's striking characterizations, particularly of the headmistress, and her gift for atmosphere kept me hanging on until the last page.
This is a book I recommend most highly. It is unusual, creepy, and extremely well written, and will stay with you long after you put the book down. (