Debbie Robson's Blog - Posts Tagged "drusilla-modjeska"
Forgotten Australian Women Novelists
Originally posted 25/9/2015
It’s only the last ten years or so that I have really questioned how few Australian women novelists there were (or at least we know of today) writing in the years 1900-1950. Before then I just accepted the exceedingly low number as normal and relative to the times. Australia was a small country, population wise. It was a given that in those years it would have been much harder for women to get published and then harder still to keep writing with the demands of a husband and children. And nearly all not as lucky as Eleanor Dark with a studio of her own. No surprise there weren’t many. Or so I thought.
As I began to read more widely on the subject, I discovered that quite a few had slipped through the net of history. They wrote, they published but were forgotten (or ignored) by those who came after to make up the lists of worthy novelists of the 20th century. What I’ve only recently discovered is how many were left off the lists! A surprisingly large number. I have had to do a complete 360 in my thinking and marvel at how many were actually writing and regret that so many came to be forgotten and in most cases completely out of print.
Dale Spender in her book Writing a New World: Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers chronicles those who have slipped through the net and for me (researching Australia during the 1920s) it was wonderful to read about these women. I also mention this in my blog How fiction/historical fiction can save historical fact and touch on my discovery of Jean Curlewis and her writing. An excellent essay on this fascinating writer is here.
Consulting Spender again this month I have made up a shortlist of forgotten Australian women novelists I would like to read. They are:
Elinor Mordaunt 1872-1942
Mary Eliza Fullerton 1868-1946
Mabel Forrest 1872-1935
Marie Bjelke-Petersen 1874-1969
Agnes Littlejohn 1865-1944
Julia Levy 1881-1959
Hilda Bridges 1880-1971
Lillian Turner 1867-1956
Velia Ercole 1903 -1978
None of the authors’ works are available to buy. At least as far as I have been able to discover, except for Velia Ercole's second novel Dark Windows at a cost of approximately $90 including postage from the US. (I did wonder what it was doing there). However, several libraries hold titles by the above authors so I’m hoping I will be able to borrow some of their books soon.
The titles I’m particularly interested in (because they appear to deal with Australian city life) are The Wild Moth by Mabel Forrest (a very interesting and talented woman), Jewelled Nights by the very prolific Marie Bjelke Petersen. I would also like to read Devotion by “Juliet”, the pen name of Julia Levy, who I couldn’t find much information about. Also Our Neighbours by Hilda Bridges a Tasmanian writer, along with her brother who was Tasmania’s most prolific writer with 36 novels.
Lastly but not least (as the book won the Bulletin novel competition for 1932) is No Escape by Velia Ercole (Margaret Gregory). It is set in the 1930s and explores the experiences of an Italian doctor adapting to life in rural Australia. Although not really fitting my bill for a book that will help my research of life in Sydney or Melbourne in the 1920s, it sounds very interesting.
Whilst troving for details and books of the above authors, I came across three more forgotten authors in this essay in the La Trobe Journal. Jean Campbell has not been completely forgotten although you can’t borrow or buy her first novel Brass & Cymbals for love or money. I’ve tried, believe you me. Unless my memory is playing tricks I don’t remember reading about Marjorie Clarke (writing as Georgia Rivers) in the Spender book. Her photo is at the top of this blog and she looks to me like a "kindred spirit". I hope to be able to read She Dresses For Dinner. The third writer is Doris Kerr writing as Capel Boake, who died quite young. Her output was small and the one novel of hers I really want to read, I will probably never be able to. "‘The Flying Shade’, set in Melbourne and depicting art student life in studios and cafés in the city, was finished by early 1921, but was never published."
Lastly I'll finish with Vera Dwyer who I discovered in a book of Australian women photographers. Her portrait, taken by May Moore, is striking and when I read she was a writer, I was drawn to discover more about her. I've since read two of her books, The Kayles of Bushy Lodge and The Banished Lovers, both of which I bought at abebooks.com. Several more of her books are available which is strange considering she is one of the least known of the forgotten novelists. (Is that an oxymoron?) I don't remember her being listed in the Spender book and she's definitely not in Drusilla Modjeska's Exiles at Home: Australian women writers 1925-1945.
Please watch this space in my journey to read these forgotten Australian women novelists. Hopefully I won't experience the dramas I had trying to read Eleanor Dark's first novel Slow Dawning. More details here. Wish me luck.
PS Last Saturday I found a book for $5 at the Lifeline shop at Charlestown. It looked old - a pale blue cloth hardback entitled Annette of River Bend by Irene Cheyne. I opened the book to find it was published by Angus & Robertson in 1942. Another forgotten Australian woman novelist.
It’s only the last ten years or so that I have really questioned how few Australian women novelists there were (or at least we know of today) writing in the years 1900-1950. Before then I just accepted the exceedingly low number as normal and relative to the times. Australia was a small country, population wise. It was a given that in those years it would have been much harder for women to get published and then harder still to keep writing with the demands of a husband and children. And nearly all not as lucky as Eleanor Dark with a studio of her own. No surprise there weren’t many. Or so I thought.
As I began to read more widely on the subject, I discovered that quite a few had slipped through the net of history. They wrote, they published but were forgotten (or ignored) by those who came after to make up the lists of worthy novelists of the 20th century. What I’ve only recently discovered is how many were left off the lists! A surprisingly large number. I have had to do a complete 360 in my thinking and marvel at how many were actually writing and regret that so many came to be forgotten and in most cases completely out of print.
Dale Spender in her book Writing a New World: Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers chronicles those who have slipped through the net and for me (researching Australia during the 1920s) it was wonderful to read about these women. I also mention this in my blog How fiction/historical fiction can save historical fact and touch on my discovery of Jean Curlewis and her writing. An excellent essay on this fascinating writer is here.
Consulting Spender again this month I have made up a shortlist of forgotten Australian women novelists I would like to read. They are:
Elinor Mordaunt 1872-1942
Mary Eliza Fullerton 1868-1946
Mabel Forrest 1872-1935
Marie Bjelke-Petersen 1874-1969
Agnes Littlejohn 1865-1944
Julia Levy 1881-1959
Hilda Bridges 1880-1971
Lillian Turner 1867-1956
Velia Ercole 1903 -1978
None of the authors’ works are available to buy. At least as far as I have been able to discover, except for Velia Ercole's second novel Dark Windows at a cost of approximately $90 including postage from the US. (I did wonder what it was doing there). However, several libraries hold titles by the above authors so I’m hoping I will be able to borrow some of their books soon.
The titles I’m particularly interested in (because they appear to deal with Australian city life) are The Wild Moth by Mabel Forrest (a very interesting and talented woman), Jewelled Nights by the very prolific Marie Bjelke Petersen. I would also like to read Devotion by “Juliet”, the pen name of Julia Levy, who I couldn’t find much information about. Also Our Neighbours by Hilda Bridges a Tasmanian writer, along with her brother who was Tasmania’s most prolific writer with 36 novels.
Lastly but not least (as the book won the Bulletin novel competition for 1932) is No Escape by Velia Ercole (Margaret Gregory). It is set in the 1930s and explores the experiences of an Italian doctor adapting to life in rural Australia. Although not really fitting my bill for a book that will help my research of life in Sydney or Melbourne in the 1920s, it sounds very interesting.
Whilst troving for details and books of the above authors, I came across three more forgotten authors in this essay in the La Trobe Journal. Jean Campbell has not been completely forgotten although you can’t borrow or buy her first novel Brass & Cymbals for love or money. I’ve tried, believe you me. Unless my memory is playing tricks I don’t remember reading about Marjorie Clarke (writing as Georgia Rivers) in the Spender book. Her photo is at the top of this blog and she looks to me like a "kindred spirit". I hope to be able to read She Dresses For Dinner. The third writer is Doris Kerr writing as Capel Boake, who died quite young. Her output was small and the one novel of hers I really want to read, I will probably never be able to. "‘The Flying Shade’, set in Melbourne and depicting art student life in studios and cafés in the city, was finished by early 1921, but was never published."
Lastly I'll finish with Vera Dwyer who I discovered in a book of Australian women photographers. Her portrait, taken by May Moore, is striking and when I read she was a writer, I was drawn to discover more about her. I've since read two of her books, The Kayles of Bushy Lodge and The Banished Lovers, both of which I bought at abebooks.com. Several more of her books are available which is strange considering she is one of the least known of the forgotten novelists. (Is that an oxymoron?) I don't remember her being listed in the Spender book and she's definitely not in Drusilla Modjeska's Exiles at Home: Australian women writers 1925-1945.
Please watch this space in my journey to read these forgotten Australian women novelists. Hopefully I won't experience the dramas I had trying to read Eleanor Dark's first novel Slow Dawning. More details here. Wish me luck.
PS Last Saturday I found a book for $5 at the Lifeline shop at Charlestown. It looked old - a pale blue cloth hardback entitled Annette of River Bend by Irene Cheyne. I opened the book to find it was published by Angus & Robertson in 1942. Another forgotten Australian woman novelist.
Forgotten Australian Novelists
Originally posted 6/11/2015
How do books/novelists get forgotten? I’ve been pondering this for a while now and have come up with a formulae. Well, the ingredients for a formulae and someone needs to assign values and calculate. I think it would include, in no particular order (that’s for the formulae writer to decide):
Early death of novelist. An original/exciting/groundbreaking novel is published. Word is getting around the traps and then the author dies before establishing a reputation. A perfect example is Deirdre Cash (1924-1963). Writing as Criena Rohan, the young Australian published two novels The Delinquents and Down by the Dockside and would be almost completely forgotten if her first novel had not been made into a 1989 movie. If she had not died so young, the mysterious third novel The House with the Golden Door would definitely have survived and hopefully been published, helping to establish a less tenuous reputation.
Gender bias, if the novelist is a woman, leading to a lack of reviews and recommendations and later anthologising, as examined at length in Writing a New World: Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers by Dale Spender. (Although things are now looking up as the shortlist for the 2015 Short Story Prize for emerging writers is made of 8 women and only 4 men).
The writing style of the author and/or the changing tastes of the reading public Was it avant garde? Too extreme for the masses that were the reading public of, say, 1924. If we could only get a hold of that elusive book written in 1923 we would discover that it’s author should never have been forgotten. See my review of Jean Curlewis’s Beach Beyond.
A reclusive and/or difficult author. As pointed out in the excellent article: Turning Pages: The lost or forgotten classic novels that should be back in print - a difficult author can sabotage their own fame and that of their novels. "Some authors might have been better-known if they were less reclusive (Gregory Day's pick, the poet George Mackay Brown, spent most of his life in the Orkney Islands); or less independent and bloody-minded (Geordie Williamson's pick, the eccentric James Hamilton-Paterson, is admired by Michael Ondaatje and Barry Humphries)."
Not successful in winning any major prizes or competitions. Once your novel has won a competition such as the Miles Franklin your name is registered for all time and your book guaranteed a place in Australian literary history. Although at Sydney Review of Books Nicolas Jose eloquently states: "There is a difference between literary history and living literature. Winning the Miles Franklin may gain you a place in the historical record. But there’s no reason why today’s reader should be bound by the decisions of yesterday’s judging committee. It is as interesting to ask why a writer or a book may not work for us as to insist that it is a great work because someone once gave it a prize."
Meeting the needs of the moment only. This generally won't ensure a book's long term survival. A very good example of this is the Australian pulp fiction (yes Australian!) of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. As Andrew Nette explains at Kill Your Darlings - "It was throwaway fiction in every sense of the word: cheap; printed on rough paper; featuring lurid cover art designed to make the books stand out at news stands and kiosks. It also had a healthy dose of cultural cringe, with the majority of the stories set elsewhere – usually America."
Of course tastes change and not even quality writing can always be assured of survival. In my research on the 1920s I came across some Forgotten Australian Women Novelists. Of course the 1920s is a long time ago so I moved my research period forward and began to wonder who were the top male and female authors 1940-1950. From publication listings accessed by the very helpful AustLit we have below a list of the top five male Australian authors:
J.W. Heming
Carl Dekker
Bob Mackinnon
Kevin M. Slattery
Philip Richmond.
The top five female authors for the same period are:
Maysie Greig
Jennifer Ames
Marie Ford
Mary Mitchell
Edna Finlay
I'm afraid I've never heard of any of them. Their popularity hasn't saved them for posterity. Luckily over the last ten years or so there has been a concerted push by a number of institutions to save selected worthy books and novelists from being completely forgotten. There is the excellent Text Publishing Classic Series, Sydney University Press’s Classic Australian Works, Allen & Unwin’s recently launched House of Books, and other reprints.
I and my fellow colleagues at Australian Women's Writers Challenge are also doing our bit to help raise awareness of underrated or forgotten novelists. Sue at Whispering Gums has recently reviewed The Snow Kimono by Mark Henshaw. Henshaw wrote one of my all time favourite books by an Australian - Out of the Line of Fire. The novel burst into our consciousness in 1988 and was one of the most acclaimed novels of the 1980s. And then the author disappeared from the literary world. Another forgotten novelist is Fredric Manning who wrote, (for me anyway) the unforgettable WWI novel The Middle Parts of Fortune which thankfully Lisa has reviewed at ANZ Litlovers. Hopefully her review will lead to more readers of Manning's thought provoking novel and the publication of The Snow Kimono, a host of new readers for Henshaw.
Just in case you are wondering, here are details about our top two novelists from AustLit "John Winton Heming was the author of some 50 pulp novelettes and claimed to have written perhaps two thousand short stories. Heming published in different genres and under a variety of names and pseudonyms." And our top female. "Maysie Greig was a journalist with the Sydney Sun newspaper from 1919 to 1920. There is some evidence that Greig published the same works, often under different titles, under different names in England and the United States."
I am currently reading The Drowning Maze by Jean Curlewis published in 1922. Watch this space for the review. The only trouble is, I will have to add the book first. Jean Curlewis, is a forgotten novelist as far as Goodreads is concerned, at least until recently and yours truly.
How do books/novelists get forgotten? I’ve been pondering this for a while now and have come up with a formulae. Well, the ingredients for a formulae and someone needs to assign values and calculate. I think it would include, in no particular order (that’s for the formulae writer to decide):
Early death of novelist. An original/exciting/groundbreaking novel is published. Word is getting around the traps and then the author dies before establishing a reputation. A perfect example is Deirdre Cash (1924-1963). Writing as Criena Rohan, the young Australian published two novels The Delinquents and Down by the Dockside and would be almost completely forgotten if her first novel had not been made into a 1989 movie. If she had not died so young, the mysterious third novel The House with the Golden Door would definitely have survived and hopefully been published, helping to establish a less tenuous reputation.
Gender bias, if the novelist is a woman, leading to a lack of reviews and recommendations and later anthologising, as examined at length in Writing a New World: Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers by Dale Spender. (Although things are now looking up as the shortlist for the 2015 Short Story Prize for emerging writers is made of 8 women and only 4 men).
The writing style of the author and/or the changing tastes of the reading public Was it avant garde? Too extreme for the masses that were the reading public of, say, 1924. If we could only get a hold of that elusive book written in 1923 we would discover that it’s author should never have been forgotten. See my review of Jean Curlewis’s Beach Beyond.
A reclusive and/or difficult author. As pointed out in the excellent article: Turning Pages: The lost or forgotten classic novels that should be back in print - a difficult author can sabotage their own fame and that of their novels. "Some authors might have been better-known if they were less reclusive (Gregory Day's pick, the poet George Mackay Brown, spent most of his life in the Orkney Islands); or less independent and bloody-minded (Geordie Williamson's pick, the eccentric James Hamilton-Paterson, is admired by Michael Ondaatje and Barry Humphries)."
Not successful in winning any major prizes or competitions. Once your novel has won a competition such as the Miles Franklin your name is registered for all time and your book guaranteed a place in Australian literary history. Although at Sydney Review of Books Nicolas Jose eloquently states: "There is a difference between literary history and living literature. Winning the Miles Franklin may gain you a place in the historical record. But there’s no reason why today’s reader should be bound by the decisions of yesterday’s judging committee. It is as interesting to ask why a writer or a book may not work for us as to insist that it is a great work because someone once gave it a prize."
Meeting the needs of the moment only. This generally won't ensure a book's long term survival. A very good example of this is the Australian pulp fiction (yes Australian!) of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. As Andrew Nette explains at Kill Your Darlings - "It was throwaway fiction in every sense of the word: cheap; printed on rough paper; featuring lurid cover art designed to make the books stand out at news stands and kiosks. It also had a healthy dose of cultural cringe, with the majority of the stories set elsewhere – usually America."
Of course tastes change and not even quality writing can always be assured of survival. In my research on the 1920s I came across some Forgotten Australian Women Novelists. Of course the 1920s is a long time ago so I moved my research period forward and began to wonder who were the top male and female authors 1940-1950. From publication listings accessed by the very helpful AustLit we have below a list of the top five male Australian authors:
J.W. Heming
Carl Dekker
Bob Mackinnon
Kevin M. Slattery
Philip Richmond.
The top five female authors for the same period are:
Maysie Greig
Jennifer Ames
Marie Ford
Mary Mitchell
Edna Finlay
I'm afraid I've never heard of any of them. Their popularity hasn't saved them for posterity. Luckily over the last ten years or so there has been a concerted push by a number of institutions to save selected worthy books and novelists from being completely forgotten. There is the excellent Text Publishing Classic Series, Sydney University Press’s Classic Australian Works, Allen & Unwin’s recently launched House of Books, and other reprints.
I and my fellow colleagues at Australian Women's Writers Challenge are also doing our bit to help raise awareness of underrated or forgotten novelists. Sue at Whispering Gums has recently reviewed The Snow Kimono by Mark Henshaw. Henshaw wrote one of my all time favourite books by an Australian - Out of the Line of Fire. The novel burst into our consciousness in 1988 and was one of the most acclaimed novels of the 1980s. And then the author disappeared from the literary world. Another forgotten novelist is Fredric Manning who wrote, (for me anyway) the unforgettable WWI novel The Middle Parts of Fortune which thankfully Lisa has reviewed at ANZ Litlovers. Hopefully her review will lead to more readers of Manning's thought provoking novel and the publication of The Snow Kimono, a host of new readers for Henshaw.
Just in case you are wondering, here are details about our top two novelists from AustLit "John Winton Heming was the author of some 50 pulp novelettes and claimed to have written perhaps two thousand short stories. Heming published in different genres and under a variety of names and pseudonyms." And our top female. "Maysie Greig was a journalist with the Sydney Sun newspaper from 1919 to 1920. There is some evidence that Greig published the same works, often under different titles, under different names in England and the United States."
I am currently reading The Drowning Maze by Jean Curlewis published in 1922. Watch this space for the review. The only trouble is, I will have to add the book first. Jean Curlewis, is a forgotten novelist as far as Goodreads is concerned, at least until recently and yours truly.
