Lindsay was 71 when her gothic classic was published. A new book unearths the winding, often thwarted creative endeavours of her life – and delights in her late success

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If Joan Lindsay is known to contemporary readers, it is as the author of the classic Australian novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, which was published in 1967 and made into a feature film directed by Peter Weir in 1975. What is surprising about Brenda Niall’s engrossing biography of Lindsay is how little of it is devoted to Picnic at Hanging Rock, which was published when its author was 71 years old.

Lindsay abandoned her first vocation, as a painter, when she was in her 20s. Her list of published works is short, comprising an early pseudonymous novel, occasional journalism, two memoirs and one late-career showstopper of a novel. This biography is not, accordingly, an account of the artist at work but rather a complex and often poignant narrative of a thwarted creative life. It is the portrait of a middle-class marriage in which the husband’s career is granted priority without question.