INTRODUCTION
The Twyborn Affair (1979), the last of Patrick White’s novels, is a psychological tripartite novel, which shows the progress of an ambiguous gender-bender character who bears a new name for each part of his/her life. The protagonist is first Eudoxia (the sexual partner of an ageing Greek man), then Eddie Twyborn (who goes through a number of bisexual experiences), and finally Eadith Trist (the madam of a London brothel).

By critically confronting the politics of sex and revealing White’s private, inner-world, the novel anticipated the representation of traditionally invisible and alternative models of sexuality in literature. (Main source: The Literary Encyclopedia)

The Twyborn Affair is available in paperback through Vintage Classics.

Review by Alan Lawson
The Twyborn Affair: "the beginning in an end" or "the end of a beginning"? - Essay by A. Ramsey

CHARACTER DESCRIPTION: Don Prowse
The character of Don Prowse appears in the second part of the novel, the one set in Australia. Prowse is the manager of 'Bogong', the sheep ranch in the outback where the hero Eddie Twyborn finds a job as a "jackeroo" (a ranchhand). White describes Prowse as an aggressively masculine bushman "at his most ostentatiously virile, in faded moleskins and heavy consipicuously polished boots, a generous golden fell wreathed round the nipples of the male breasts [...], the smile [an] invitation to lust". Prowse regards Eddie with contempt ("He's nothun more than a bloody queen") and yet the two get entangled in a tortured and confusing affair, which will end with Prowse's departure from Bogong.