Marcus Clarke

by Michael Wilding

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732 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Michael Wilding is emeritus professor at the University of Sydney. He was a founding editor of the UQP’s Asian & Pacific Writing series, of the short story magazine, Tabloid Story, and co-founder of publishers Wild & Woolley, and Paperbark Press. He has also been a milkman, postman, newspaper columnist, apple-picker, Cosmopolitan ‘Bachelor of the Month’, and Chair of the New South Wales Writers’ Centre. He has published twenty-four works of fiction and books of criticism on Milton, Marcus Clarke and Henry Lawson. He has been translated and published in over twenty countries.

Reviews

[Rosemary Atwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this anthology of collected essays, journalism and fiction of Marcus Clarke makes one realise just how wide-ranging and astute were his perceptions of nineteenth-century Australia and its multi-layered society.

Now mainly remembered for the romantic and sprawling ‘His Natural Life/For the Term of His Natural Life’ (the foundation stone of the Tasmanian Gothic genre and included in this volume), Clarke’s ability to transplant European sensibilities to his adopted land give a fresh and, at times, Blakean vision of its qualities - ‘The Land of the Dawning,’ where ‘wrapped in the mists of early morning, her history looms vague and gigantic;’ a place of ‘Weird Melancholy’ where one ‘becomes familiar with the beauty of loneliness.’
A close friend of Cyril and Gerard Manley Hopkins, his writing shares something of the latter’s sublimity and natural realism.

This is a lovely overture to Clarke’s work with a comprehensive and sensitive introduction by Michael Wilding. Highly recommended.