Isabella Gullifer-Laurie
ABOUT
WRITING
REVIEWS & ESSAYS
Rebecca Birrell’s Venus, Vanishing — Literary Review
Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House — LA Review of Books
--- mental weather, friendship, disillusionment, desire
Barbara Hanrahan’s Sea Green — Sydney Review of Books
--- sensuous spirituality, burning ambition, and art in the 1960s
Sally Potter’s The Gold Diggers — Senses of Cinema
--- allegory and feminist filmmaking in British cinema
William Wyler’s The Heiress — Cinema Reborn
--- Henry James, Washington Square, and adaptation
Helle Helle’s they — The Saturday Paper
Claire-Louise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye — The Monthly
--- frayed desire, notebook digressions, and private enquiry
Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book — ArtReview
--- Pasolini, love, pink pyjamas, and the historical novel
Hélène Bessette’s Lili Is Crying — The Saturday Paper
Monica Raszewski’s Crimson Light Polished Wood — The Saturday Paper
Katherine Brabon’s Cure — The Guardian
--- illness narratives, memory, and motherhood
Delphine Seyrig’s Be Pretty and Shut Up! — Senses of Cinema
--- French feminist video collectives and Carole Roussopoulos
Antigone Kefala’s Fiction — The Saturday Paper
Beverley Farmer’s The Seal Woman — The Saturday Paper
Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait & Letters to Gwen John — Sydney Review of Books
--- painting, self-portraiture, and autobiography
Lauren Aimee Curtis’ Strangers at the Port — Meanjin
--- mystery, migration, and the Aeolian islands
Deborah Levy’s The Position of Spoons — The Saturday Paper
Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow — Chicago Review
--- time, souvenirs, and ways of seeing
Roberta Torre’s In the Mirror — Roughcut
--- the star image and afterlives of Monica Vitti
Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium — The Saturday Paper
Audrey Lam’s Us and the Night — Kill Your Darlings
--- libraries, geography, and language games
Niki de Saint Phalle’s Un rêve plus long que la nuit — MIFF Revue
--- dreams, nightmares, and art on film
Amina Cain’s A Horse at Night — Meanjin
--- pleasure, reading, and the lyric essay
Anna Kate Blair’s The Modern — The Saturday Paper
Jen Craig’s Wall — Overland
Bella Li’s Theory of Colours — Meanjin
--- contiguity, poetic freefall, and palimpsests
Rebecca Birrell’s Venus, Vanishing — Literary Review
Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House — LA Review of Books
--- mental weather, friendship, disillusionment, desire
Barbara Hanrahan’s Sea Green — Sydney Review of Books
--- sensuous spirituality, burning ambition, and art in the 1960s
Sally Potter’s The Gold Diggers — Senses of Cinema
--- allegory and feminist filmmaking in British cinema
William Wyler’s The Heiress — Cinema Reborn
--- Henry James, Washington Square, and adaptation
Helle Helle’s they — The Saturday Paper
Claire-Louise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye — The Monthly
--- frayed desire, notebook digressions, and private enquiry
Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book — ArtReview
--- Pasolini, love, pink pyjamas, and the historical novel
Hélène Bessette’s Lili Is Crying — The Saturday Paper
Monica Raszewski’s Crimson Light Polished Wood — The Saturday Paper
Katherine Brabon’s Cure — The Guardian
--- illness narratives, memory, and motherhood
Delphine Seyrig’s Be Pretty and Shut Up! — Senses of Cinema
--- French feminist video collectives and Carole Roussopoulos
Antigone Kefala’s Fiction — The Saturday Paper
Beverley Farmer’s The Seal Woman — The Saturday Paper
Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait & Letters to Gwen John — Sydney Review of Books
--- painting, self-portraiture, and autobiography
Lauren Aimee Curtis’ Strangers at the Port — Meanjin
--- mystery, migration, and the Aeolian islands
Deborah Levy’s The Position of Spoons — The Saturday Paper
Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow — Chicago Review
--- time, souvenirs, and ways of seeing
Roberta Torre’s In the Mirror — Roughcut
--- the star image and afterlives of Monica Vitti
Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium — The Saturday Paper
Audrey Lam’s Us and the Night — Kill Your Darlings
--- libraries, geography, and language games
Niki de Saint Phalle’s Un rêve plus long que la nuit — MIFF Revue
--- dreams, nightmares, and art on film
Amina Cain’s A Horse at Night — Meanjin
--- pleasure, reading, and the lyric essay
Anna Kate Blair’s The Modern — The Saturday Paper
Jen Craig’s Wall — Overland
Bella Li’s Theory of Colours — Meanjin
--- contiguity, poetic freefall, and palimpsests
READ MORE
‘Murky Effects’ | Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House | 2026
Like her earlier books, The Palm House is steeped in the lumpy, benign factuality of pubs, buses, chips, beer, dirty bedrooms, borrowed couches. Rainy Sunday afternoons are loops of emotional torture, close to the stodgy ones of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels, the sawtooth edge of wasted hours found in the work of Rosamond Lehmann. How these women sit on barstools and wait for their future to arrive! Riley’s protagonists have an unfinished quality, finding themselves lost in lingering astonishment at how things have made out. They don’t seem to know how to gain and hold attention, and they display strange temperamental contradictions, being astute as well as vacant. They behave as atrociously as any terrible mother or boyfriend and have an ambivalent relationship to the emotional needs of their familiars. Discursions into family history and childhood memories—a prominent feature in Riley’s work—expose the wriggling underside.
Read more ...
‘Ah, Sunflower!’ | Barbara Hanrahan’s Sea Green | 2026
The colourful prints and artworks, for which Hanrahan is best known, are mesmerising in their elaborate, seductive surfaces. Like illuminated manuscripts, the prints contain detailed flourishes in miniature, recurring motifs and symbols, embellishment and illustration. Her works depict hearts of love, the grape-like eyes of God, curling vines, furred beasts, exploding florals. Children are exultant creatures, of peace, and also violence, some angelic, some unborn. Men and women are alternately delighting, pleasure-seeking figures, or passionless and ashamed. When she was a student, some of her classmates derided her work as ‘feminine decorative pretty stuff’, a bit too ‘arty-crafty’.
Read more ...
Claire-Louise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye | 2025
Situating us at the end of love, the narrator’s desire only ever seems to begin again, tumbling into thoughts of erotic caresses remembered or imagined. This plotless swish and loop is characteristic of Bennett, whose interest in phenomenology places her narrators in the clinch of dailiness. As in Pond and Checkout 19, there is a rapture taken in quotidian pastimes: shopping, exercise, cleaning, sleep. The narrator exults at the thought of buying “sardines and oranges and yoghurt and pears, and Earl Grey tea bags”. Bouquets are bought and rearranged, she dreams of killing a scorpion with a heavy book, a lover spills coffee on her favourite slippers, she swims in the sea, and eats sausage rolls and crisps. The novel bears down with wondrous force on things as simple as making an omelette...There is something wonderfully illicit in the way Bennett chooses her words: wilful, vinegary and alive.
Read more ...
Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book | 2025
Laing’s prose is sleek and gratifying, purring with sateen grace. Nicholas is awed by Pasolini’s hypnotic speech, ‘his soft, whispery voice and the apocalyptic things he says’, a model for Laing’s own discretionary style. Yet the chimerical beauty of Nicholas’s new life begins to collapse, spoiled by vague pressures and political hostilities. Nicholas and Danilo are tossed to the grinder of love and lust, undone by affairs and shifting loyalties. The striving for aesthetic beauty in their work seems a futile, necessary decadence; in defiance of the ugliness, corruption and hate around them.
Read more ...
Hélène Bessette’s Lili is Crying | 2025
What makes a novel? Bessette’s crackles with disobedience, advancing waywardly across the page, her style compressed, fragmented, repetitious. Chronology is dropped, time scattered in the dust. The small unit of the sentence becomes a crucial marker of duration and simultaneity. What makes a day, a life? Lili has an abortion, war breaks out, her husband is interned in Dachau. These events are introduced lightly, jumbled asides that blanch the novel of any bourgeois cosiness. Formally, thematically, it is a book about submission and dominance – the tension between various plots, between mothers, daughters, husbands. “Show me a woman who’s chosen something,” says Lili. Bessette uses the tiret, or dash, to indicate both acts of speech and inward talk. In a feverish, choral narration that collects the voices of Lili, Charlotte and other village wives, we glimpse a world of secret thought, sneaky gossip and chatter that reforms and deforms social bonds and hierarchies.
Read more ...
‘Women Talking’ | Delphine Seyrig’s Be Pretty and Shut Up! | 2025
Delphine Seyrig’s stardom was celestial. Cerebral, sculpted as marble, her face flamed screens the world over, her hair bright with the heavenly tones of dawn and dusk. Her celebrity rose as she worked with seminal filmmakers of the European art cinema including Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, and Luis Buñuel. Her initials – D. S. – became synonymous with déesse, French for goddess. Yet Seyrig’s second act, her later work as an activist and filmmaker, sought to unravel some of this mythology. “I’m not an apparition, I’m a woman,” she whispers to Jean-Pierre Léaud at the end of Truffaut’s Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968). Her famous “Medusa voice,” so “tender and ferocious,” would be used to refute and recalibrate how women were represented in cinema.
Read more ...
Antigone Kefala’s Fiction | 2025
Kefala’s women are not dramatic. They are poised, observant, hungry in body and mind for freedom, beauty, authority. Restlessly they must remake themselves, constructing a sympathy between what they have abandoned and what they can now abide. Her sentences can be crisp and scrupulous, images sharpened to a point. At other times, her prose is like a riddle, closer to a sensuous dream-work, all photographic blur and spill. Reading across this collection one can recognise the shifts in Kefala’s style, her steady maintenance of a language that guards and gives generously. Her peculiar vision is both austere and lyrical, elegantly fluent in the secret ways of the self.
Read more ...
‘Her Own Witness’ | Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait and Letters to Gwen John | 2024
Celia Paul is filmed painting in her studio. Standing with her narrow back to the camera, she drags a bristle brush loaded with smoke-coloured paint across a small canvas on an easel. A thin grey ground has already been applied to it. She then dips the brush in a pot of turps and cleans it with a stained towel draped around her shoulders. She spends a great deal of time doing this, and all the while continues to look at her painting. The side of her face is visible, and thin puce lips twist into either a grimace or a wry smile. The effect is like that of watching a dog burying a bone, lodging a secret underneath the earth. Aside from her outstretched arm, she is, however, almost totally still.
Read more ...
‘The Voyage Out’ | Lauren Aimee Curtis’s Strangers at the Port | 2024
Strangers at the Port is suffused with a political consciousness—its interest lies in how one might go about telling, and how authority is inscribed at every level of explanation ... Curtis is conscious of how the conditions of outsiderliness are constructed—national borders, geographic boundaries, language, appearance, forms of dress, the thresholds between childhood and adulthood, the hard line between material comfort and deprivation. Her compositional approach intends to unsettle, her characters are marked by their sense of loss, and being lost.
Read more ...
Deborah Levy’s The Position of Spoons | 2024
In her poems, plays, novels and memoirs, Levy favours scenes that stage the ambivalent relationship between surprise, annoyance, pleasure and pain. The Position of Spoons delivers such preoccupations in essays, letters and stories collected over the past two decades. As unkempt as a kitchen drawer, it contains finely polished introductions to writers such as Colette and Elizabeth Hardwick, as well as some miscellany: scrappy but charming meditations on topics as varied as electricity pylons, charisma and the death drive by way of famous car crashes. “It is sometimes agreeable to just lie in bed and think our own thoughts,” Levy writes. Many of the pieces, at just a few pages long, follow the laxity of this impulse. The collection is determined towards a wayward brevity, proceeding via affinity and whim.
Read more ...
Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow | 2024
This is a text which renders language with a soft and smoothing touch, shyly and also slyly. For despite the narrator’s humble glance—always looking out, and around—she maintains a narrative voice that invites authority with one hand whilst seeming to give it away with the other. The narrator is also self-conscious of her manner of speech: as if “applying a kind of firm but gentle pressure”. She appears to abdicate the fictive pact that begins with the use of “I,” straying away from proximity, favoring distance. This is not quite a feint at narratorial impersonality, although Au seems enamored of the cooling effect of such a voice. Rather, this textural choice implicates a desire to hew something smooth from what was once rough or uneven. There is an understanding, then, that prose style is a careful mediator of personality. If the text exhibits the narrator’s toil, the deft but difficult work of saying something just so, it arrives at a style through a deliberating effort that conceals its own labor.
Read more ...
‘Murky Effects’ | Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House | 2026
Like her earlier books, The Palm House is steeped in the lumpy, benign factuality of pubs, buses, chips, beer, dirty bedrooms, borrowed couches. Rainy Sunday afternoons are loops of emotional torture, close to the stodgy ones of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels, the sawtooth edge of wasted hours found in the work of Rosamond Lehmann. How these women sit on barstools and wait for their future to arrive! Riley’s protagonists have an unfinished quality, finding themselves lost in lingering astonishment at how things have made out. They don’t seem to know how to gain and hold attention, and they display strange temperamental contradictions, being astute as well as vacant. They behave as atrociously as any terrible mother or boyfriend and have an ambivalent relationship to the emotional needs of their familiars. Discursions into family history and childhood memories—a prominent feature in Riley’s work—expose the wriggling underside.
Read more ...
‘Ah, Sunflower!’ | Barbara Hanrahan’s Sea Green | 2026
The colourful prints and artworks, for which Hanrahan is best known, are mesmerising in their elaborate, seductive surfaces. Like illuminated manuscripts, the prints contain detailed flourishes in miniature, recurring motifs and symbols, embellishment and illustration. Her works depict hearts of love, the grape-like eyes of God, curling vines, furred beasts, exploding florals. Children are exultant creatures, of peace, and also violence, some angelic, some unborn. Men and women are alternately delighting, pleasure-seeking figures, or passionless and ashamed. When she was a student, some of her classmates derided her work as ‘feminine decorative pretty stuff’, a bit too ‘arty-crafty’.
Read more ...
Claire-Louise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye | 2025
Situating us at the end of love, the narrator’s desire only ever seems to begin again, tumbling into thoughts of erotic caresses remembered or imagined. This plotless swish and loop is characteristic of Bennett, whose interest in phenomenology places her narrators in the clinch of dailiness. As in Pond and Checkout 19, there is a rapture taken in quotidian pastimes: shopping, exercise, cleaning, sleep. The narrator exults at the thought of buying “sardines and oranges and yoghurt and pears, and Earl Grey tea bags”. Bouquets are bought and rearranged, she dreams of killing a scorpion with a heavy book, a lover spills coffee on her favourite slippers, she swims in the sea, and eats sausage rolls and crisps. The novel bears down with wondrous force on things as simple as making an omelette...There is something wonderfully illicit in the way Bennett chooses her words: wilful, vinegary and alive.
Read more ...
Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book | 2025
Laing’s prose is sleek and gratifying, purring with sateen grace. Nicholas is awed by Pasolini’s hypnotic speech, ‘his soft, whispery voice and the apocalyptic things he says’, a model for Laing’s own discretionary style. Yet the chimerical beauty of Nicholas’s new life begins to collapse, spoiled by vague pressures and political hostilities. Nicholas and Danilo are tossed to the grinder of love and lust, undone by affairs and shifting loyalties. The striving for aesthetic beauty in their work seems a futile, necessary decadence; in defiance of the ugliness, corruption and hate around them.
Read more ...
Hélène Bessette’s Lili is Crying | 2025
What makes a novel? Bessette’s crackles with disobedience, advancing waywardly across the page, her style compressed, fragmented, repetitious. Chronology is dropped, time scattered in the dust. The small unit of the sentence becomes a crucial marker of duration and simultaneity. What makes a day, a life? Lili has an abortion, war breaks out, her husband is interned in Dachau. These events are introduced lightly, jumbled asides that blanch the novel of any bourgeois cosiness. Formally, thematically, it is a book about submission and dominance – the tension between various plots, between mothers, daughters, husbands. “Show me a woman who’s chosen something,” says Lili. Bessette uses the tiret, or dash, to indicate both acts of speech and inward talk. In a feverish, choral narration that collects the voices of Lili, Charlotte and other village wives, we glimpse a world of secret thought, sneaky gossip and chatter that reforms and deforms social bonds and hierarchies.
Read more ...
‘Women Talking’ | Delphine Seyrig’s Be Pretty and Shut Up! | 2025
Delphine Seyrig’s stardom was celestial. Cerebral, sculpted as marble, her face flamed screens the world over, her hair bright with the heavenly tones of dawn and dusk. Her celebrity rose as she worked with seminal filmmakers of the European art cinema including Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, and Luis Buñuel. Her initials – D. S. – became synonymous with déesse, French for goddess. Yet Seyrig’s second act, her later work as an activist and filmmaker, sought to unravel some of this mythology. “I’m not an apparition, I’m a woman,” she whispers to Jean-Pierre Léaud at the end of Truffaut’s Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968). Her famous “Medusa voice,” so “tender and ferocious,” would be used to refute and recalibrate how women were represented in cinema.
Read more ...
Antigone Kefala’s Fiction | 2025
Kefala’s women are not dramatic. They are poised, observant, hungry in body and mind for freedom, beauty, authority. Restlessly they must remake themselves, constructing a sympathy between what they have abandoned and what they can now abide. Her sentences can be crisp and scrupulous, images sharpened to a point. At other times, her prose is like a riddle, closer to a sensuous dream-work, all photographic blur and spill. Reading across this collection one can recognise the shifts in Kefala’s style, her steady maintenance of a language that guards and gives generously. Her peculiar vision is both austere and lyrical, elegantly fluent in the secret ways of the self.
Read more ...
‘Her Own Witness’ | Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait and Letters to Gwen John | 2024
Celia Paul is filmed painting in her studio. Standing with her narrow back to the camera, she drags a bristle brush loaded with smoke-coloured paint across a small canvas on an easel. A thin grey ground has already been applied to it. She then dips the brush in a pot of turps and cleans it with a stained towel draped around her shoulders. She spends a great deal of time doing this, and all the while continues to look at her painting. The side of her face is visible, and thin puce lips twist into either a grimace or a wry smile. The effect is like that of watching a dog burying a bone, lodging a secret underneath the earth. Aside from her outstretched arm, she is, however, almost totally still.
Read more ...
‘The Voyage Out’ | Lauren Aimee Curtis’s Strangers at the Port | 2024
Strangers at the Port is suffused with a political consciousness—its interest lies in how one might go about telling, and how authority is inscribed at every level of explanation ... Curtis is conscious of how the conditions of outsiderliness are constructed—national borders, geographic boundaries, language, appearance, forms of dress, the thresholds between childhood and adulthood, the hard line between material comfort and deprivation. Her compositional approach intends to unsettle, her characters are marked by their sense of loss, and being lost.
Read more ...
Deborah Levy’s The Position of Spoons | 2024
In her poems, plays, novels and memoirs, Levy favours scenes that stage the ambivalent relationship between surprise, annoyance, pleasure and pain. The Position of Spoons delivers such preoccupations in essays, letters and stories collected over the past two decades. As unkempt as a kitchen drawer, it contains finely polished introductions to writers such as Colette and Elizabeth Hardwick, as well as some miscellany: scrappy but charming meditations on topics as varied as electricity pylons, charisma and the death drive by way of famous car crashes. “It is sometimes agreeable to just lie in bed and think our own thoughts,” Levy writes. Many of the pieces, at just a few pages long, follow the laxity of this impulse. The collection is determined towards a wayward brevity, proceeding via affinity and whim.
Read more ...
Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow | 2024
This is a text which renders language with a soft and smoothing touch, shyly and also slyly. For despite the narrator’s humble glance—always looking out, and around—she maintains a narrative voice that invites authority with one hand whilst seeming to give it away with the other. The narrator is also self-conscious of her manner of speech: as if “applying a kind of firm but gentle pressure”. She appears to abdicate the fictive pact that begins with the use of “I,” straying away from proximity, favoring distance. This is not quite a feint at narratorial impersonality, although Au seems enamored of the cooling effect of such a voice. Rather, this textural choice implicates a desire to hew something smooth from what was once rough or uneven. There is an understanding, then, that prose style is a careful mediator of personality. If the text exhibits the narrator’s toil, the deft but difficult work of saying something just so, it arrives at a style through a deliberating effort that conceals its own labor.
Read more ...