Yasmine Gooneratne was a poet, a writer of short stories and novels, and a literary critic, editor and reviewer. Born in Sri Lanka in 1935, while the country was still known as 'Ceylon', she was educated at Bishops College School for Girls and the University of Peradeniya, where she was a dedicated student of English literature. Yasmine was awarded a scholarship to the University of Cambridge in the 1950s, and she completed her doctorate there, as a Postgraduate student at Girton College. Her thesis was a groundbreaking one, and was one of the first published works of scholarship in the field of Commonwealth Literature. She is renowned as an Eighteenth Century scholar, and her books on the work of Jane Austen and Alexander Pope, published by Cambridge University Press, have been studied by university students all over the world.
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In the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Yasmine Gooneratne was a Senior Lecturer and then a Professor at Macquarie University, where she taught generations of Australian students of literature in her fields of specialist interest. She was given a Personal Chair by the university. And she was awarded the Order of Australia for her services to literature and education, in 1990.
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Many of her students went on to become writers and teachers themselves, and they remember with respect and admiration the lady in the saree who taught them with such knowledge and enthusiasm for her subject, opening their eyes to post colonial literature by Naipaul and Ruth Jhabvala, and opening the horizons of world literature to them. She is widely regarded for her generosity as a colleague, teacher and literary mentor. Yasmine Gooneratne wrote a personal memoir of her family, Relative Merits, in 1986. Thereafter, she began to write novels. A Change Of Skies showed the challenges of a Sri Lanka couple's immigration to Australia. The Pleasures Of Conquest is a novel made of interlinked and parallel stories. Her third novel, The Sweet And Simple Kind, was shortlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award in 2008.
In the past few years, she has written two more novels: Rannygazoo and A Little Light Reading. As she has appointed me her Literary Executor, it is my task to ensure these are published in the years to come. Yasmine passed away on 15 February, this year, from an inflammatory lung condition that could not be treated. She was 88 years old. She and I, her daughter, had been engaged in building the Gooneratne Memorial Library in Sri Lanka, to recognise the lives and love of books of three members of our family, after my Father passed away in 2021 - Gooneratne Memorial Library - A Legacy of Love, Learning, and Literature. - FemAsia Magazine .
We found solace and inspiration in the process of unpacking boxes of books, discussing and deciding what physical sections of the library each collection would occupy, and in arranging photographs and mementos of the lives of our literature-loving family. One of Yasmine Gooneratne's greatest attributes was her openness to new ideas and new perspectives. She had many favourite writers, and among them many Australian writers. One of her favourite poems was by Judith Wright, and there will be a special bookmark embroidered by Yasmine herself, to mark the page in which it can be read by visitors to the Library.
Request To A Year
If the year is meditating a suitable gift,
I should like it to be the attitude
of my great- great- grandmother,
legendary devotee of the arts,
who having eight children
and little opportunity for painting pictures,
sat one day on a high rock
beside a river in Switzerland
and from a difficult distance viewed
her second son, balanced on a small ice flow,
drift down the current toward a waterfall
that struck rock bottom eighty feet below,
while her second daughter, impeded,
no doubt, by the petticoats of the day,
stretched out a last-hope alpenstock
(which luckily later caught him on his way).
Nothing, it was evident, could be done;
And with the artist's isolating eye
My great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene.
The sketch survives to prove the story by.
Year, if you have no Mother's day present planned,
Reach back and bring me the firmness of her hand.
I wrote a poem myself, after her funeral had been arranged and everything done as she wished. It seems to me to lack music, my own poem. But that is probably too much to expect, in the circumstances.
- Devika Brendon
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Everything Is Inverse – a poem by Devika Brendon (for Yasmine Gooneratne)
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