Antonia White died in leaving behind four novels, over thirty translations mainly Colette , two books about cats, some stories and a piece of autobiography. She also left two daughters Susan Chitty and Lyndall Hopkinson and more than a million words of diaries — work that some consider her greatest achievement, and the editing of which led to a public row and legal action between the girls, who disagreed about what kind of woman their mother was.
The two things people know about Antonia White are that she wrote Frost in May and that she was a disgraceful mother. Some doubtless know it the other way around.
Mud sticks. But none of this would have surprised White, who was not unaware of what her daughters thought of her. Nor of what she was like herself. Her journals, after all, span more than half a century, fill more than forty notebooks and ringbinders, and make virtually no reference to events in the outside world.
She had years and years of analysis; and she spent a large part of her life with people who spent a large part of their time talking about themselves. Her analyst told her that she talked people to death. Certainly it must have been deadly to have been either her or her husbands as they sat up night after night in circuitous discussions about what was wrong with their relationship.
Poor Emily Coleman was found going through the wastepaper basket one night after everyone had gone to bed, trying to work out who had written what about her. And she worried about her effect on other people.
