A Secretive Life

This intergenerational story of lesbian love is wonderful! Moving, sexy and funny, it is brilliantly interwoven with real historical figures and events that span most of the twentieth century. It traces the emergence of a lesbian identity through the eyes of an acerbic and thoroughly endearing woman who helped to create the world we now live in. This is a terrific read.

- Georgine Clarsen - Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists

Sara Hardy's well-honed skills as a biographical researcher and dramatist shine as she interweaves fictional characters and historical women like Vita Sackville West, Radclyffe Hall and Edna Walling in her first novel, which sparkles with crackling dialogue and sharp wit. Thrilling, funny, poignant and tragic, A Secretive Life takes the reader on an engrossing journey across decades and continents as narrator Cecilia, trapped in the 'velvet prison' of a nursing home in Kent, recalls her long and eventful life. From early experience in a women's ambulance unit in France at the end of WWI to competing for the British team in the cross-country rally at Hitler's 1936 Olympic Games to driving ambulances during the Blitz in London, Cecilia's love of cars and women form a central thread on this wild ride through the changing patterns of twentieth century lesbian life. From the clandestine to the out and proud, it is a history that needs to be told.

- Sylvia Martin - Ink in Her Veins: the Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer

It's very entertaining. A delicious read.

- Pamela Rabe - multi award winning actor -

from Wentworth to The Wizard of Oz 

Sara Hardy's bold, earthy and wonderfully propulsive novel transports us across the 20C, from London between the wars to (naughty) Weimar-era Berlin to (more reserved) Melbourne, with appearances from the likes of Radclyffe Hall and Dolly Wilde (Oscar's niece) to Vita Sackville-West and Margareta Webber (of Melbourne bookshop fame). And some wartime ambulance and future racing car drivers for good measure! An utter delight!

- Martin Shaw - literary agent and former head book-buyer for Readings bookshops

Hardy's meticulous research and powers of story-telling give us an insightful and intimate novel that will appeal to a wide audience. Here is a novel in which Cecilia, the narrator, travels across continents and decades of social change, from pre-World War II to the 1970s. Furthermore, it focuses on the lives of lesbian women - historical and fictitious.

- Sandra Shotlander - Playwright and Senior Advisor, Women Playwrights International

Bold, dramatic, funny and sexy. A Secretive Life is a fictionalised account of the lesbian demimonde that flourished despite and because of the great upheavals of the twentieth century. Cecilia, introduced as an ingenue in the roaring 1920s, goes on to encounter fascinating women including the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Dolly Wilde, Edna Walling and Radclyffe Hall via London, Paris, Berlin and Melbourne.

- Loretta Smith - A Spanner in the Works - the extraordinary story of Alice Anderson and Australia's first all-girl garage