Picnic at Hanging Rock

Picnic at Hanging Rock is an Australian historical fiction novel by Joan Lindsay. The novel, set in 1900, is about a group of female students at an Australian girls' boarding school who vanish at Hanging Rock while on a Valentine's Day picnic, and the effects the disappearances have on the school and local community. The novel was first published in 1967 in Australia by Cheshire Publishing and was reprinted by Penguin in 1975. It is widely considered by critics to be one of the greatest Australian novels. In 2022, it was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II. Overview Although the events depicted in the novel are entirely fictional, it is framed as though it were a true story, corroborated by ambiguous pseudohistorical references. Its unresolved conclusion has sparked significant public, critical, and scholarly analysis, and the narrative has become a part of Australia's national folklore as a result. Lindsay claimed to have written the novel over two weeks at her home Mulberry Hill in Baxter, on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, after having successive dreams of the narrated events. An excised final chapter of the novel was published posthumously as part of a book entitled The Secret of Hanging Rock, which also included critical commentary and theories about the novel. Another book, titled The Murders at Hanging Rock, was published in 1980, proposing varying other interpretations. The novel has been adapted into other media, most famously in the 1975 critically well-received film of the same name by director Peter Weir. Plot The novel begins with a brief foreword stating that whether the novel "is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves" and implying that the events occurred.