Eizabeth Jolley was, after the poet Judith Wright, the most written-about woman writer in Australia and the first to abandon the realist style. Her fiction, 14 novels and four collections of short stories, was distinctive.

She was quirky, cultivating the appearance of a little old lady, although when she began writing she was in her early fifties. Oblivious to fashion and without vanity, in the 1960s she made skirts and kaftans from the material that another university wife silk-screened, and then regularly wore them with open-toed sandals for the rest of her life.

For 35 years she taught creative writing to students in Perth, Western Australia, and would regularly travel large distances to participate in book clubs and writing groups. Her persona and her prose made her one of the country’s most loved literary figures.

Her writing was heavily autobiographical in its themes, if not in her use of personal detail. At first this was something she hid, and she later only hinted at it. The Mitchell Library, Sydney, holds 67 boxes of her writings, but her detailed diaries, written before and after she arrived in Australia from England, are closed to the public during her children’s lifetimes.

Monica Elizabeth Knight was born in Birmingham. Her father was a teacher who had met her mother while on a Quaker famine-relief mission to Vienna after the war. Her mother was Viennese, of aristocratic descent but no longer rich and something of a fabulist, claiming that her own father was both a general and a judge; in fact he worked for the Austrian railway.

Her father, to whom Elizabeth was devoted, was jailed as a conscientious objector in the First World War. Elizabeth would describe the family household as “half English and three-quarters Austrian”.

During the 1930s the Knights’ house was full of refugees from Europe, often depriving Elizabeth and her sister of their beds and compounding, for the impressionable young woman, a sense of exile.

After brief spells at infant and primary schools and a succession of French, Swiss and Austrian governesses, Elizabeth was sent to a Quaker boarding school. Apart from spells of loneliness, it was a time she cherished. In 1939 her mother sent her to Germany to stay with pen friends, who enrolled Elizabeth in a Jungmädelföhrerinlager near Hamburg for a fortnight.

Back at home she began nursing training. Among casualties of war, prisoners of war and burns victims, she met a patient, whose tubercular hip was misdiagnosed (he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis). He was Leonard Jolley, a librarian, ten years her senior. They met again in 1943 in Birmingham, where she worked at Queen Elizabeth Hospital and he, by then married, was the Selly Oak Colleges Librarian.

In 1946 she kept house for a Birmingham doctor and then became the school matron at Pinewood in Hertfordshire. She had her first child, by Jolley, in 1950.

Leonard Jolley had joked with his fellow librarian, Philip Larkin, that he would look for work in the North, leaving the South to Larkin. In autumn 1950 Jolley became librarian in the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh, where Elizabeth joined him, and after a difficult divorce — made more so as he was a Quaker — they married. Two more children were born.

He became deputy librarian at the University of Glasgow in 1956. But the grim weather, poor pay and the couple’s strained relationship with Elizabeth’s parents made an offer for Leonard to be the head librarian at the University of Western Australia attractive.

In November 1959 the Jolleys reached Perth. She became a faculty wife but soon took up part-time work. She tried her hand at selling cosmetics and cleaning agents door-to-door, and real estate (both unsuccessfully) and worked as a house cleaner and in a nursing home. These experiences were put to good use in her early novels and short stories.

In about 1962 she began to write. In 1965 one of her short stories was published, and she began to teach “enrichment” classes in creative writing at the Freemantle Arts Centre. Finally in 1976, the Freemantle Arts Centre published Five Acre Virgin, her first collection of short stories, all of which had previously been broadcast by the BBC and ABC.

The title was partly inspired by a weekend retreat that the Jolleys had purchased at Wooroloo, 40 miles east of Perth, in 1970. It also formed the likely setting for her first novel, Palomino (1980), and for the end of her second novel, The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1981); and was the subject of her nonfictional Diary of a Weekend Farmer (1993).

In 1978 she began teaching fiction at what is now Curtin University in Perth. Tim Winton, twice nominated for the Booker Prize, and Deborah Robertson, currently short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, were two of her students.

In 1983 Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, one of her best novels, and Mr Scobie’s Riddle were published. The latter won The Age Book of the Year award. The following year, Milk and Honey was awarded the NSW Premier’s Prize for Fiction, and in 1986 The Well won Australia’s preeminent literary prize, the Miles Franklin award.

The Well was made into a film in 1997, directed by Saman-tha Lang and shown in competition at Cannes. Jolley’s autobiographical trilogy, My Father’s Moon, Cabin Fever, and The Georges’ Wife, is probably her finest achievement.

She was at times compared with Grace Paley, Muriel Stark and Barbara Pym. Angela Carter described Jolley’s comic method as juxtaposing “profound feeling with low farce, high camp with agonised lyricism”.

Jolley once wrote that many of her passages “spring from the feelings of being uncherished and excluded. They spring too from the cruelties in human life. Bitter knowledge, grief and unwanted realisation, often in greater proportion, go side by side with acceptance, love and hope”. Sexuality was a major preoccupation: bigamy, incest, paedophilia; bisexuality, homosexuality and lesbianism figure in her work. Difficulty with intimacy was a recurring theme.

In 1988 Jolley became an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) and in 1997 she was named in the list of 100 National Living Treasures.

Leonard Jolley died in 1994. She is survived by her three children.

Elizabeth Jolley, AO, novelist, was born on June 4, 1923. She died on February 13, 2007, aged 83