User:Zesprott/Randolph Stow

Born in Geraldton, Western Australia, Randolph Stow was the son of Mary Campbell Stow née Sewell and Cedric Ernest Stow, a lawyer. They were married in 1930. Stow has one sister, Ellen, who was born in 1937.

His father's family was from Suffolk, where they had owned land for several generations before Stow's great-great-grandfather (Reverend Thomas Stow) was appointed the colonial missionary to South Australia by the London Colonial Missionary Society in 1836. After Thomas Stow's death, the Stow Memorial Church was constructed in his honor. His wife, Elizabeth Randolph Eppes, was American and her mother was Thomas Jefferson's first cousin. The Stow lineage can be traced back to the Plantagenets and William the Conqueror.

Thomas Stow's eldest son and Randolph Stow's great-grandfather was Randolph Isham Stow, a judge on the Supreme Court of South Australia. Randolph Stow's grandfather and father both continued in the legal profession.

His mother's family settled in Australia in the 1830s and were some of the earliest to arrive. Stow's great-grandfather, George Sewell, arrived in Australia in 1835; soon after, the rest of his family relocated from Essex to Australia. Sewell eventually moved from Perth to Geraldton, where his descendants remained. Stow grew up very interested in the traditional stories and histories of the region.

The Girl Green as Elderflower is often considered to be closely linked to Stow's life. After dealing with a bout of malaria in Papua New Guinea, he moved to East Bergholt in Suffolk in England from 1969 to 1981, his ancestral county, and he used traditional tales from that area, many of which he translated from Latin himself, to inform his novel The Girl Green as Elderflower. The regional stories Stow used for the novel were collected by William of Newburgh, Gervase of Tilbury, Gerald the Welshman, Ralph Coggeshall, Roger Howden, and Walter Map. Many of the characters in the novel are based on Stow's friends. He conducted research in advance of the novel for several years. In 1978, he and John Constable's great-great-grandson were in a serious car accident, which finally spurred Stow to begin writing the novel. On New Year's Day 1979, he began writing and finished thirty-two days later.

Stow was influenced by the focus on particular places in English Victorian literature and set the entire novel in Suffolk. Literary scholar Melanie Duckworth has claimed that, in The Girl Green as Elderflower, Suffolk is not mere setting, but rather a textured and historied place. Although he kept the location static, the novel takes place over a variety of time periods. It focuses one place throughout and across time. Stow engages in what Duckworth calls "Australian medievalism," drawing connections between the Middle Ages and postcolonial Australia and Papua New Guinea. This connection is most clear between the medieval legend of green children and the novel's titular Welsh "girl green." Stow draws a parallel between greenness and strangeness in the medieval period to the aftermath of contemporary colonial projects. Ultimately, according to Duckworth, it is trauma (both for the main character, Crispin Clare, and the colonial/postcolonial places he inhabits) that draws the narrative out of and across time. Destabilization of time is positioned as a means of recovery, particularly for Clare.

In March 2019, La Mama Courthouse Theatre in Melbourne, Australia adapted The Girl Green as Elderflower into a musical. It was adapted by Richard Davies and directed and orchestrated by Sara Grenfell.