Picnic at Hanging Rock is her best known work. It was made into a 1975 feature film by producers Patricia Lovell, Hal and Jim McElroy, and director Peter Weir. The story is fiction, though Lindsay dropped hints that it was based on an actual event. An ending that explained the girls' fates, in draft form, was excised by her publisher prior to publication. The final chapter was published only in the 1980s, in accordance with her wishes.
Lindsay based Appleyard College, the setting for the novel, on the school that she had attended, Clyde Girls Grammar School (Clyde School), at East St Kilda, Melbourne—which, incidentally, in 1919 was transferred to Woodend, Victoria, in the immediate vicinity of Hanging Rock itself.
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Famous quotes containing the word hanging:
“February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long.”
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