Anna, Angus Gaunt

wadholloway Australian, Literature , ,

ReadIndies Month

Anna by Angus Gaunt was the co-winner of the 2025 “20/40” Prize – for works between 20,000 and 40,000 words – from Finlay Lloyd publishing. I don’t know how many words it is, but it’s 110pp. The other co-winner was Kim Kelly with Touched.

WG sent me Anna last year to get my opinion (I’m sorry, I’ve misplaced the card she sent with it) and I’ve saved it up to participate in Kaggsy’s ReadIndies Month. Finlay Lloyd, based in Braidwood, NSW, are definitely ‘indies’ “without the commercial imperative of most publishers,” well, half their luck! “we are able to champion ideas and authors for their intrinsic interest and quality.”

The author’s bio says “Angus Gaunt was born and educated in England and came to Australia in 1987.” I put that in because for all that Gaunt has been here for the best part of 4 decades, this is a totally European story.

Anna, a young woman, is a detainee – I’ve just read a near future dystopia, set in the US, where women are held on suspicion that they might commit crimes and so are ‘retainees’, theoretically still holding rights that detainees don’t (The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami). We have all sorts of weasel words for holding people we don’t like in concentration camps – in a camp in an endless forest of mostly birch and aspen (I’ve been reading the words ‘birch’ and ‘aspen’ all my life without knowing, or even wondering particularly what they are. Well, trees obviously, confined to the northern hemisphere, and I think to colder climates, and apparently aspen mostly coexist with conifers).

The story is an old one. There has been a war. Families on the losing side are displaced, herded into remote camps where they are poorly fed and made to work. Anna, having the care of her own younger siblings, has been given the care of others as well. On this day, it seems the war is over, the gates are open, Anna ventures out into the surrounding forest, bumps into a guard, a boy her own age

She was not used to the back and forth he seemed to want. He knew little of Anna’s language, beyond greetings and thanks, but she had picked up enough of his to grasp most of his words. It was odd hearing the language used like this. Her experience of it had mostly been words that could be barked – commands and threats and insults.”

Anna wanders off into the bush. By the time she gets back to the camp it is deserted. Trucks have come for the guards and the detainees have followed them on foot to the railhead, some days walk away. Anna sets out to follow them, encounters the boy guard who with a lucky shot with one of his last bullets has killed a hare. They share it and she warily allows him to accompany her.

When they finally reach the rail head, the last train has been and gone. An old couple living in one of the few remaining cottages of a derelict railway village takes them in. Temporarily. Anna will press on.

It is hard to say what this story is , or even why it was written. Certainly it maintains our interest – will Anna ever make her way out of the forest? Is the boy guard anything other than a necessary, though barely trusted, ally in a difficult situation?

But what does it say about the many, many Anna’s of this world making their way on foot from impossible situations to slightly less impossible situations? Not a lot, certainly nothing about the causes of their situation. Nor is it a particularly deep character study. And – I’m sure Sue is waiting for this – what does a sixtyish man, safe in middle-Australia, bring to our understanding of a not yet adult girl, coping with isolation and starvation, a long way from home, a home that probably no longer exists? Not much.

I mentioned above The Dream Hotel in which Lalami explores undeserved internment, effectively a critique of the mindset that produced ICE; in The Left Hand of Darkness the great Ursula le Guin uses two people on a long, difficult trek to explore all sorts of things, but especially our understanding of gender; and if you want a male author envisaging how a young Australian woman might deal with war, you have John Marsden’s Tomorrow series.

Anna is none of these. WG, in her review, sees the story as succeeding as a character study. She writes, “Anna is beautiful to read, from the first sentence. The language is tight but expressive. The necessary tension is off-set by moments of tenderness and hope ..”.

.

Angus Gaunt, Anna, Finlay Lloyd, Sydney, 2025. 110pp

Finlay Lloyd are proud that their books are printed in Australia. Anna was printed by IVE Print Victoria. Not a name I recognised, but a search turned up that IVE’s printing operations in Melbourne were the former Franklin Web where I worked for many years off and on developing software (when I went out on my own around 1987 my intention was to write software for the transport industry, but Franklin Web kept giving me so much work that I ended up an expert on printing operations).

Two more Canadian women in the Bush

wadholloway Literature , , , ,
A typical Canadian Bush scene, but where’s the snow?

It has surprised me that Canadians seem to use ‘the Bush’ as we do, as that great outdoors where man struggles against hostile nature, where women, to the extent that they are allowed in, must stand by their man.

Of course – I hope you see it as ‘of course’ – I have spent a great deal of my blog documenting how Australian women writers developed a counter myth, the myth of the Independent Woman equally at home in the Bush as the men. From a theory point of view, this seemed to me to be an Australian take on the New Woman movement and first wave feminism, combined with a genuine love of Bush living.

Marcie/Buried in Print keeps introducing me to new (to me) Canadian women and Indigenous authors and I hope I am making my way towards an overview. So, Nellie McClung might be Canada’s Miles Franklin; Susanna Moodie, the hard done by wife in a Barbara Baynton story (a comparison Moodie would hate); but it is harder to name a Canadian Catherine Helen Spence or Eve Langley.

The two women I consider here, Sheila Watson and Aritha van Herk, the former is a contemporary of Langley, and similarly ‘poetic’; van Herk we could compare maybe with Nikki Gemmell and Shiver.

Sheila Watson, The Double Hook (1959)

Sheila Watson (1909-1998) was raised, educated and taught for some years in British Columbia. Two years spent teaching at relatively remote Dog Creek BC gave her the idea for The Double Hook, her first published novel, which came out in 1959 while she was doing a PhD under Marshall McLuhan at University of Toronto, although it had been written some years earlier and struggled to find a publisher.

Yet when it came out, it was to immediate acclaim. My guess is that it was recognised as the first literary work to engage with the Canadian backwoods, the first intersection of Modernism and the Bush. The novel (novella) begins:

In the folds of the hills
under Coyote’s eye
lived
the old lady, mother of William
of James and Greta

James and Greta live with the ‘old lady’ in the family home, one of a number of farming properties spread along a creek. By the end of the first page, the old lady is dead, pushed down by James. “You’ll not fish today”, he says. Yet for the remaining 130 odd pages, the old lady is seen on farms up and down the valley, fishing as she had for years, irrespective of property rights.

James and Greta must, separately, work out how they can bring the death of their mother to a conclusion that is not ‘James killed his mother’, and to do that in the midst of the ordinary dramas of the other households along the valley: William and his wife Ara who live in their own house nearby; Felix whose wife and children have gone off with another man; the Widow whose young daughter, James’ lover, is missing; and so on.

Episodes in the lives of these people flicker in and out, until resolved by a fire, a death, a birth; while in the background, there is Coyote, a nod, the only nod, to the valley’s original inhabitants.

Aritha van Herk, The Tent Peg (1981)

Aritha van Herk (1954- ) grew up in Alberta, where it appears, she still lives, though the setting for The Tent Peg, her second novel, is the Yukon, the Canadian territory adjacent to Alaska. Van Herk’s marital status shouldn’t matter, but as it happens her husband is an exploration geologist.

The story is that an androgynously shaped young woman, JL, is taken on as cook for a crew of nine geologists, all guys, who will be camping out for the three relatively snow-free months of summer in the mountains where the corporation they work for believes they might find uranium. The narration is carried forward, a few pages at a time, by whoever has something to say. Mackenzie, the team leader, who’s getting too old for field work, initially believes JL is a boy:

The toilet flushes and he [JL] comes out of the cubicle and stands beside me and stares at my cock singing piss against the enamel … I’m beginning to think that his problem is he’s queer, when he says flat out and still staring at my member, “Mackenzie, I’m a girl.”

Mackenzie takes her on anyway. JL is a Sociology student, but also an experienced camp cook, so that’s not a problem; and the rest of the novel is about how she is able to assert her independence in the face of the men who assume they can fuck her, and interestingly, of the men who would treat her as mother confessor. And of course there’s the scenery – flying in to a lake in a valley in the little seaplane which keeps them in supplies; swooping up and down the mountains in the helicopter which carries the men to site; hiking in the forest. Having read about van Herk’s geologist husband only as I was writing this up, I imagine he has taken her up there at least once.

All the men think about, quite a number of them obsess about, JL’s body. The summer ends with JL owning her woman’s body, saying as Eve Langley says, yes, look, I’m a woman, not a man, but there is a place for me here too, an equal place, not a subsidiary place.

February is ReadIndies month.

I have an ‘Indies’ post in mind for next week, but thought to check out the publisher of both these works, McClelland & Stewart, and discovered that, while now subsumed into PenguinRandomHouse, they were over most of the previous century an important, independent outlet for Canadian work (Wiki), publishing Kilmeny of the Orchard by L. M. Montgomery in 1910; and later, writers including Leonard Cohen, Margaret Lawrence and Michael Ondaatje, to list just the ones whose names I recognise.

Their New Canadian Library imprint, under which both these books were published, was a line of ‘quality’ paperbacks intended for the college and university market. I think of ‘Indie’ publishers as doing small print runs of works too far off mainstream for the big guys to want to handle. M&S, as with Angus & Robertson in Australia, were big in their home markets. The most ‘indie’ thing you can say about them, and it’s not nothing, is that they weren’t owned by the oligarchs in London and New York.

Luckily I checked Kaggsy’s page before posting and I see that with M&S now a subsidiary of PRH these books are no longer eligible for listing.

.

Sheila Watson, The Double Hook, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1959. 134pp
Aritha van Herk, The Tent Peg, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1981. 228pp

Christine Brooke-Rose

wadholloway English, Literature , ,

I forget now exactly how it happened, but a few months ago Marcie (Buried in Print) and I came across mention of an experimental, post-modern writer of whom I at least had never previously heard. Chasing information about her, I found another blogger describing her as “criminally neglected” (here), going on: “Her work is enlightening and entertaining, posing some extremely interesting questions regarding the British approach to the development of literary theory in the twentieth century.”

Christine Brooke-Rose (1923-2012) was English, born in Switzerland, grew up in Belgium, served in the WAAF at Bletchley Park during WWII, before completing a BA and an MA at Oxford and a PhD at University College London. She went on to work as a literary academic and author, both in England and overseas.

“But don’t you think, Miss Grampion,” said the professor beyond the long, wide table, “that palatal dipthongisation in fourteenth century Kentish may have been optional?” Opening paragraph of The Languages of Love, Brooke-Rose’s first novel.

Marcie and I were intrigued enough to read a novel each by Brooke-Rose to see for ourselves. The one I manged to get hold of was Thru (1975) which is one of four – Out, Such, Between, Thru – which can be read together; and was number 8 of her 16 novels (Wiki Bibliography).

Thru goes on like this for 165 pages. I found each page interesting to read, but very little connection between one page and the next. Sometimes a character, Larissa in particular, would come up for a while. And often the subject, to the extent I could make sense of it, was language itself, with lots of tortured puns.

Brooke-Rose would I’m sure have been a very interesting lecturer, extremely knowledgeable about the beginnings of the English novel – which after all is my project for the next year or two – if only I could follow what she is saying:

Take Homer for instance through to the civilization of the sign with its dualistic binary structure and its vertical hierarchy which coincides roughly though not by chance with the Renaissance … Thru p.33

Interestingly, Goodreads contains no synopsis of Thru but one reviewer (MJ Nicholls) says “The final novel of the quartet is her most typographically ambitious work, bearing all manner of acrostic and spirally puzzles, many inscrutable to those not immersed up to their eyeballs in literary theory ..” which I think pretty well sums it up.

We might have left it there but I came across this: “After publishing four well-reviewed, conventional novels, Brooke-Rose survived a difficult illness and moved to France, where she began writing experimental fiction.” (Poetry Foundation). And so I ordered her first, The Languages of Love (1957) to see what she was like before her works turned into concrete poetry.

The novel commences – as per the quote with which I began this post – with Julia Grampion being examined on her PhD thesis. After the ordeal is over, one of the examiners, Dr Reeves takes her for drinks, on his Lambretta. He’s married but he soon makes it clear he wants to get in Julia’s pants. After Thru, The Languages of Love is an ordinary campus autofiction, just the sort of novel I favour.

Another of the examiners offers Julia a lecturer’s position in a regional university. Reeves scores a book deal on medieval adultery or somesuch. He holds out to Julia the opportunity to contribute.

Julia is engaged to Paul who is working on East African languages with Hussein. Paul is Catholic. Julia married and divorced (in the Church of England) as a teenager during the War, is willing to convert, but the Catholic Church will not allow Paul to marry a divorcee. All very reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh’s tortuous Catholicism around the same time. Hussein is the lover of Georgina who has a Japanese fetish.

Julia agrees she and Paul have no future. Goes home to cry. Reeves comes round and does the older man you just cry on my shoulder thing. He’s persistent. They all mill around each other for weeks.

Bernard [Reeves] changed his tactics. “Darling, I was only teasing.” You look so stunning in that dress, I can’t bear anyone else even talking to you.” She said nothing. She liked him to be jealous, but she had always been annoyed by the premature and proprietary way he called her ‘darling’, almost from the first. She reserved the word for intimacy, which she had no intention of allowing.

Which she thought she had no intention of allowing. Soon they get to the old: ‘She lay half undressed on the bed, comforting him. He was sobbing without tears … “I was frightened … that you would find me middle aged and inadequate, and I am.”’

Of course, Paul chooses that moment to knock on the door ..

Things go on from there. There’s drama with Hussein, returning to Africa, not returning. A declaration of love involving a camel. There’s drama with Bernard’s wife. It’s all very surfacey. And say what you like about Sally Rooney, she gets deep inside her protagonists.

The novel ends with Julia having learnt things about herself; and as it begins, with “the problem of dipthongisation in fourteenth century Kentish.”

Julia’s first conversation with Reeves is about whether she might have to become an ordinary novelist. The Languages of Love is an enjoyable enough read, but in the end it is just another ‘ordinary’ campus novel. I don’t think though that Brooke-Rose was happy to be ordinary, hence Out, Such, Between, Thru.

.

Christine Brooke-Rose, The Languages of Love, first pub. 1957. 173pp.
Christine Brooke-Rose, Thru, first pub. 1975. 165pp.

WomanTheory, Anon on Christine Brooke-Rose (here)
Poetry Foundation, Christine Brooke-Rose (here)

Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea, Marie Munkara

wadholloway Aboriginal, Biography , ,

It is a matter of great disappointment – to me and no doubt to many others – that Marie Munkara (1960- ), a woman of Rembarranga (Arnhem Land) and Tiwi descent, has written only two adult novels: the fierce satires Every Secret Thing (2009) and A Most Peculiar Act (2014).

I guess in this account of her life I was hoping for a writer’s memoir, an insight into how she came to write two such wonderful works, but Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea (2016) is a memoir not so much of her own life, but of her relationship with her mother from whom she was stolen at age 3 and only returned to in adulthood.

The style of the writing is conversational, largely (but not entirely) without the bite of her novels. In my review of Every Secret Thing I wrote that “it would be sad if [Munkara] were the Marigold in these stories, stolen from loving parents, sent away as a baby to be bought up Catholic and trained for service, constantly beaten and raped by her employers, who finally returns to her family only to find she doesn’t fit in.” What can I say – she wasn’t “trained for service”.

Munkara tells her story in four parts. Part 1 is a prologue where she discovers her origins at age 28, locates her mother, flies unannounced from Melbourne to Darwin to Nguiu on Bathurst Island, and is there immediately recognised:

“I’m your mummy,” she says. “Come in and have a cup of tea.” I am flabbergasted and stand there staring at her. My mother! I glare at this impertinent woman. My mum can’t be possibly be shoe-polish black like this and my mum hasn’t laid eyes on me for twenty five years …

The squalor, the crowded living conditions, the food, are too much, she stays a short while, fortified by lots of wine, then flies back home.

Part 2 is her childhood as the foster daughter of white middle class Catholic parents in suburban Adelaide, from whom, by adulthood, she was largely estranged. She has very little good to say about her mother, and nothing at all about her father, who molested her almost from the get-go.

Munkara is not entirely clear, but the assumption is that for most of these years she ‘passed’. Although, for a while at least, her parents belonged to a support group for foster parents of Aboriginal children, they never spoke to her about her origins.

Part 3. Almost as soon as she gets home (Melbourne) from that initial visit, Munkara is determined to go back to her mother and her family and make a real go of it.

My family don’t even bat an eyelid when I arrive back on Bathurst Island and on their doorstep with my belongings, It’s like I hadn’t even left the place. But I can handle that because there are no routines here, people eat when they’re hungry and go to sleep when they’re tired, and after a lifetime of rules and being told what to do I know I am going to love the freedom.

This is the bulk of Munkara’s story, almost exactly half the 274 pages. It starts where you or I would – appalled at the living conditions, avoiding the local shop “because it looks scary with the hordes of black people hanging around it.” But she gets used to it, makes accommodations, but also manages to set some limits. Over time she learns to dress appropriately – no shorts, no midriff tops; to find her place as aunty, sister, daughter to everyone in a community of two or three thousand people; to take part in community life – fishing, wading in mangrove swamps, drinking (I’m not sure she ever warms to killing and eating turtles); speaking Tiwi.

Then, having lived as an ordinary member of her family, as an Aboriginal woman in her own community, she returns to ‘white’ life, but on new terms, living in Darwin, just across the water from the Tiwi Islands, rather than down South.

Part 4. There in Darwin, working in the Centre for Communicable Diseases at Royal Darwin Hospital, she is immediately taken in by the other half of her family, the Remburranga side, “spread out across the Top End”, centred on Maningrida in Arnhem Land (map), east of Darwin, hearing about her first 3 years, things her reticent mother hadn’t and couldn’t tell her.

In December 2000, so 12 years after their reunion, her mother dies and her funeral marks the end of this memoir.

I sometimes think of how I was taken from the loving arms of my mum … and given into the ‘care’ of a paedophile and a violent abusive woman and I feel great big holes in my heart for what was lost. And then I tell myself to look on the bright side of things because I wouldn’t be who I am if I hadn’t lived the life I have.

As it happens, while thinking over Munkara’s account of her life, I was listening to Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me, read by Roy, her account of her life as it revolved around her mother. And I had the same thought, that I was hoping for a literary memoir. But perhaps both women are saying the same thing, that for all the problems, their mothers were absolutely central to their lives and if you don’t understand that, then you don’t understand their writing.

.

Marie Munkara, Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea, Vintage Books, Sydney, 2016. 274pp.

Discipline, Randa Abdel-Fattah

wadholloway Australian, Literature , ,

These days, with ICE, Trump’s Gestapo, killing white people in its occupation of Minneapolis, along of course with all the brown people being dragged off the streets throughout the US for arbitrary incarceration, deportation, disappearing and sometimes death, it is easy to forget that Genocide continues in Gaza, and indeed all Occupied Palestine, under cover of Trump and Netanyahu’s mock ceasefire.

Discipline (2025) is a story about how Palestinians, safe in Australia, cope with what is happening to family, people they know, a country they love, to what might be its complete disappearance, live-screened to an apathetic world.

Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979- ), an Australian-born woman of Egyptian and Palestinian parents, who identifies as Palestinian (rather then ‘pro-Palestinian’), was of course in the news just a couple of weeks ago when she was disinvited from speaking at this year’s Adelaide Festival Australian Writers Week, leading to an almost unanimous boycott by writers and the cancelling of the week.

Australian governments, state and Federal, Liberal and Labor, are far more pro-Israel than the general population, and it was pressure from South Australia’s Labor Premier, on the notionally independent Festival Board, which led to Abdel-Fattah’s invitation to attend being withdrawn (and to the resignation in protest of Writers Week director Louise Adler).

Abdel-Fattah has since launched defamation actions against the Premier, Malinauskas, for his comments likening her to a terrorist murderer.

Her first career was as a lawyer, but she is now a research fellow at Macquarie studying ‘Islamophobia, race, Palestine, the war on terror’. See Coming of Age in the War on Terror (2021). Her first work of fiction was the YA Does My Head Look Big in This? (2005) about a schoolgirl deciding to wear the hijab.

Discipline is Abdel-Fattah’s first work of adult fiction, an interrogation of how Palestinian-Australians cope; of how self-censorship works in the supposedly liberal press and academia; of how pressure from above works to suppress analysis (and facts) not conforming with the world-view of those in charge, in this case, the pro-Israel views of the ruling class.

Hannah is a young, Muslim journalist on a paper which might be the Sydney Morning Herald; her husband Jamal is a PhD student whose mother and wider family are trapped in Gaza, under daily bombardment by the Israeli occupation forces; Ashraf is Jamal’s supervisor whose ex-wife had become increasingly devout and has now moved with their two daughters and a new husband to Yemen.

Abdel-Fattah isn’t a literary writer, her prose is plain (which is good, some writers not naturally literary go for florid), and the story is clearly told from the point of view of the three protagonists, though we tend to side with Hannah and Jamal. I’m sure her point is to say this is how ordinary, middle class Muslims live in Australia and this is what we are up against.

Australia seems to have very little fiction from post-War first and second generation migrant communities. Omar Sakr has a similar pov, and there’s AS Patric’s, Black Rock White City (2015), the early works of Christos Tsiolkas, and not much else. In some ways this work seems closer to (urban) Australian Indigenous Lit., to the fiction of Anita Heiss say, than it does to ‘Anglo’ writing.

The setting is Sydney, towards the end of Ramadam and all the observances that go with that. An 18 year old schoolboy has been arrested at a university pro-Palestine demonstration and is being charged with a terrorism offence because he was wearing a Hamas headband. The boy attends a Muslim college whose principal is Ashraf’s ex-wife’s sister. Hannah wants to tell the boy’s story but her editor constantly prefers an older journalist, more experienced in bothsidesism.

When Hannah submits a story about a Palestinian-Australian woman whose family in Gaza had all been killed by an Israeli attack on a refugee camp, the editor runs it under another story about the ‘suffering’ of Jewish-Australian families whose sons are fighting with the IDF.

The more unapolgetic and strident [Hannah] was, the more her desperation to be seen for who she was and all that it meant was interpreted as her being an intense, out of place, angry Arab woman – and, God forbid, whisper it now, identity politics.

Jamal, who wakes every morning to the prospect that his mother may not be alive to answer the phone, posts increasingly angrily on his social media, which is of course scrutinised by the university.

Ashraf, who has not been putting runs on the board, accepts funding from the Dept of Home Affairs for a research project into Muslim yoof, and then must weasel out of his commitments to Jamal.

It is made clear to Hannah that if she doesn’t back off from her ‘political’ positions she will be increasingly sidelined.

Abdel-Fattah attempts to finish her novel on an upbeat note, but we, a year after publication, can already see a future Gaza, ’emptied’ of its population, no longer a site of mass murder, but a real estate opportunity for the Trumps.

.

Randa Abdel-Fattah, Discipline, UQP, Brisbane, 2025. 245pp.

New writers event to replace cancelled Adelaide Writers Week

Randa Abdel-Fattah and Louise Adler are to headline Constellations: Not Writers Week from 28 Feb – 5 Mar 2026, with other participants including J.M. Coetzee, Yanis Varoufakis, Clare Wright, Bob Brown and Melissa Lucashenko.

Oroonoko, Aphra Behn

wadholloway English, Literature, Uncategorized , , ,

The Novel pre-JA

I was lucky enough to buy (for $5), a few months ago at a UWA/Save the Children Book Sale, this hardback collection of ten ‘novels’ by Aphra Behn, published in 1913, and annotated in some detail by, I’m guessing, the first owner (see pic below). I say ‘novels’ because the two longest are 70-80pp and the shortest, less than 10.

The first story in the collection is ‘The Royal Slave’ more often known these days by the first part of its full name Oroonoko: or The Royal Slave, first pub. 1688. 82pp. This is a strong story, about a proud man and a proud woman tricked into slavery by perfidious Englishmen, and shipped from Africa to English plantation owners in Surinam, an English colony on the Caribbean coast of S America from 1630 till late in the century when it was surrendered to the Dutch.

When this was written, Behn had been for some years a prolific playwright, and had also had some other stories published, most notably Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–1687). 280pp. And it is Love-Letters which has a strong claim to being the first novel written in England.

I’m sticking, for the time being, to Don Quixote, translated into English 70 years earlier, as being the first novel published in England. But I’m sure our ideas of what is a novel will change as we read more. Already, Marcie is arguing that length doesn’t matter.

Here is Marcie/Buried in Print’s review of Oroonoko.

Bip-ColourBuried in Print

My first copy of Oroonoko (1688) by Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was a skinny little volume bound like a play. It felt a little like a travelogue, and a little like epic poetry—harder to read than either—with a love story (if one calls Romeo-and-Juliet a love story). Read on …

Women Writing Before Jane Austen

wadholloway English, Literature , , ,

The Novel pre-JA

Australian scholar, writer and feminist, Dale Spender did the reading world a great service when she documented just how many women had been writing before Jane Austen and how they had been written out of the English canon. Both Marcie/Buried in Print and I have written on this subject before with reviews of Spender’s Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen (my review).

Today, Marcie has contributed to the ‘Week’ I’m not holding, not till this time next year anyway, on the novel before Jane Austen, with a discussion about some of those 100 good women, beginning with the book pictured above.

Bip-ColourBuried in Print

Writing about women writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Rebecca Romney outlines some of the risks for those who dared to venture out of the “private” sphere into the “public” in that fashion, echoing ideas expressed by Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Elaine Showalter, Dale Spender, and Ellen Moers. Read on …

The Aeneid, Virgil

wadholloway European, Literature , , , ,

The Novel pre-JA

Aeneas Defeats Turnus, Luca Giordano, 1688

The Aeneid is an epic, 9,896 lines in dactylic hexameter, written by the poet Virgil – Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 BCE) – in Rome between 29 and 19 BCE, during the reign of Augustus Caesar. I learn – from Wikipedia of course – that Aeneas is a Trojan, that he appears in the Illiad, and that this account of his journey from Troy to Italy served to tie the founding of Rome, around eight centuries earlier, to the legends of mythological Greece.

Because Latin (and Greek) were from the earliest times central to education*, the Aeneid is necessarily one of the foundational texts of English literature. And since my ambition is to understand how story-telling and writing in England developed, some time around 1700, into the English Novel; and since Bron has said she plans to read Homer; and since I have on hand a pocket edition of The Poems of Virgil (in English) given to my father by his younger sister for Christmas 1947; and since I am eager to discover why that lady (above) inadequately wrapped in a towel is fleeing the scene of the fight; I should read it.

Dad’s copy is translated by James Rhoades who writes in his ‘Preface to First Edition’ (1893) “.. it has seemed to me that, if one could produce a version of the Aeneid that should be in itself an English poem, and at the same time a faithful reflection of the original … such an achievement would be worth the time and labour.” He argues that striving for rhymes, “the jingling sound of like endings” (quoting Milton), would have spoiled the Epic rhythm.

The Aeneid is built on the ‘common knowledge’ of Virgil’s time, of eight centuries of stories and fables, and so the reader (or listener) is expected to bring some background knowledge to what they are being told. In particular the idea of fate, and the roles played by the gods, especially Juno whose principal city, Carthage, was destroyed by the Romans, Aeneas’ successors, in 146 BCE. In Virgil’s account Juno is angry that this is going to happen (six centuries in the future), and seeks repeatedly to prevent it, often antagonising her fellow gods in the process. Aeneas, being the son of Venus, has his own gods to help him out.

The Aeneid is divided into twelve books. Book 1 summarise’s Aeneas’ voyage from Troy to Italy and the disputes between the gods which interrupted it. It begins with Aeneas’ fleet already at sea and ends with them finding refuge with Dido, queen of Carthage (in North Africa, near present-day Tunis).

Of arms I sing, and of the man who first
From Trojan shores beneath the ban of fate
To Italy and coasts Lavinian came,
Much tossed about on land and ocean he
By violence of the gods above, to sate
Relentless Juno’s ever-rankling ire
In war, too, much enduring, till what time
A city he might found him, and bear safe
His gods to Latium, whence the Latin race,
And Alba‘s sires, and lofty-towering Rome
(Book 1, 1-10)

Book 2. Aeneas tells Dido the story of the Trojan Horse, of the sacking of Troy; of his escape during which he loses his wife and, retracing his steps to find her, finds only her ghost; and of then discovering that he must lead the survivors –
“New comrades, a vast concourse, matrons, men
An army massed for exile – piteous throng –
From all sides gathered, armed in heart and gear
Where’er I list to lead them over sea.”

Book 3. Aeneas’ account to Dido continues. His ships are built. They voyage initially north, then around the coasts of Greece, southern Italy, Sicily until a storm forces them to Carthage. They come across at various places ‘refugees’ from the Odyssey and the Illiad. At Buthrotum (in present day Albania opp. the heel of Italy) they find a city built in replica of Troy, “That Helenus, Priam’s son, was reigning now”. It is Helenus who first prophesies that Aeneas will found Rome – by a stream where under the oaks he will find a “monstrous sow”, white, with a litter of 30.

Book 4, Juno tricks Aeneas and Dido into a mock marriage. Dido at least is serious, so when Aeneas leaves to continue his voyage she thrusts a sword into her breast “and therewith/Her life into the breezes sped away.”

Clearly, I am taking too long to recount this story. In Books 5 and 6 Aeneas is held up in Sicily by adverse winds. He organises games for his men, and a mock battle. Juno sets fire to the ships but prayers to Jupiter bring torrential rain to save them. The ghost of Aeneas’ father, Anchises, causes Aeneas to venture into the Underworld, and there “fired his soul with love of future fame … what wars must be waged, and teaches him of tribes Laurentian, and Latinus’ town ..”

Books 7-12. Aeneas arrives at last in Latium where the king, Latinus welcomes him and offers him the hand of his daughter Lavinia. Juno (again!) intervenes and causes the queen to offer Lavinia to Turnus, the leader of the nearby Rutuli. The forces of Aeneas and Turnus engage in a number of battles, culminating in Aeneas defeating Turnus in single combat. Turnus lies with a spear through his thigh:
“Thou art the victor; and Ausonia’s folk
Have seen seen me stretch forth vanquished hands; ’tis thine
To wed Lavinia ..”
But Turnus is wearing a trophy from a friend of Aeneas’ he has killed earlier and Aeneas, who might have let Turnus live, kills him. The End.

Wikipedia has an excellent section on the ongoing influence of the Aeneid (here) in European literature, before going on to English translations. The first of which was by Gavin Douglas in 1513 and the next by John Dryden in the seventeenth century, both rhyming. The first English adaptation was English composer Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas (1688).

It seems to me at this point that formal story telling in the West began with epic poetry, then drama, and then the novel. And that by Jane Austen’s (and Walter Scott’s) time all three were flourishing side by side. The stories crossed from one form to another, but I’m not sure yet how the forms influenced each other.

My ‘week’ for The Novel Pre-Jane Austen begins officially this time, next year. But I will start keeping a list of posts – yours or mine – which contribute to the discussion, straight away. And Marcie/Buried in Print is preparing one post for this week, possibly two, which I will repost.

Emma/Book Around the Corner is also looking at early literature (from a French perspective) with an 18th century mini-project for 2026. She has on hand “Autobiographical Stories by Voltaire, Persian Letters and An Anthology of The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu.. also .. The River Guillotine, a historical novel by Antoine de Meaux set in Paris and Lyon during the French Revolution”; and has previously read Candide and Dangerous Liaisons which I already have on my list of possibles.

.

Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil), the Aeneid, published in Rome (possibly incomplete) on the author’s death in 19 BCE. My edition, The Poems of Virgil, trans. by James Rhoades, third ed., OUP, 1920, reprinted 1946. 424pp.

see also: though it has nothing to do with the history of the Novel. Ursula K le Guin, Lavinia (2008)

* The teaching of “a group of ancient poems” in English grammar schools dates to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “[C]omplex responses to Virgil’s meditations on instruction pervade early modern grammar texts, miscellaneous schoolbooks, and works by writers such as Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/17–1547), Edmund Spenser (1552?–1599), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), and John Milton (1608–1674).” Andrew Wallace, Virgil’s Schoolboys: The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England, OUP, 2010

Burn, David Ireland

wadholloway Australian, Literature , ,

I had a project a few years ago to read and review all the works of the great and underappreciated Australian novelist David Ireland (1927-2022). It turned out that John/4ZZZ, who is a frequent commenter on our posts, was engaged in a similar project on Goodreads (where he posts as Zed). We have since cooperated on some posts on Ireland’s later work and are presently reading Brett Heino’s Literary Geographies and the Work of David Ireland: An Australian Atlas (2025) for review later in the year.

The two works of Ireland’s I am yet to review are his first, The Chantic Bird (1968) and Burn (1974) which I disliked so much that I failed to finish it. On the other hand, John thinks Burn is “brilliant”, so I will briefly state my case then direct you to his review (much of which I agree with, especially on the subject of Ireland falling out of popularity).

The plot of Burn centres around the life of an Aboriginal man, Gunner McAllister, a returned soldier who had served in the Pacific in WWII, now living in a humpy on the fringes of a NSW country town, maybe based on Gundagai, with his wife Mary; 15 year old foster daughter, Joy – “She’s a good little root, this kid. Not bad at all“; and his father. A son, Gordon is away at school.

It is said that McAllister is based on the distinguished Aboriginal (Gunditjmara, Western Vic.) serviceman, Captain Reg Saunders (1920-1990), who served in WWII and in Korea, but nothing in Burn matches up with Saunders’ post-War life. The photo on the cover (above) of the Sirius/A&R edition published in 1989, the year before Saunder’s death, is of Saunders, which I think is disgraceful.

Ireland purports to be writing from inside Gunner’s head. Today that is appropriation, not something that was much thought about in the 1970s when Burn and Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith were written.

John says Burn, Ireland’s fourth novel, grew out of the play Image in the Clay, published in 1964 but first produced, in Sydney, in 1960 – so some years before his first novel. He quotes Ireland writing in the Preface: “No opinions are presented: my interest in aborigines is no more than anyone else’s, except that they are people. That is my interest”. For John, Ireland is an observer of ‘aborigines’ here as he is of “‘workers’, ‘drunks’, ‘women’, ‘red setters’, whatever” in other works and he writes what he sees. (John’s 2018 review of Image in the Clay in Goodreads, here).

John/4ZZZ’s review of Burn

Geordie Williamson says of David Ireland “He has fallen out of fashion and fashion is king in contemporary publishing. His subject matter is not simpatico with today’s currents. Now, if he was gay and took drugs instead of being straight and drinking beer, he’d be Christos Tsiolkas [author of The Slap] and a best-seller.” Read on … (Go down to reviews, Zed’s is 1st, and click on ‘Show more’).

Seven Poor Men of Sydney, Christina Stead

wadholloway Australian, Literature , ,

“Christina Stead is a simon-pure genius … the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf.” (New Yorker, 25 Apr 1936)

Christina Stead (1902-1983) was born in Sydney and grew up in Watson’s Bay at the Harbour entrance. I have told a brief version of her story in my review of Chris Williams’ biography, A Life of Letters and Stead herself told fictionalized versions of her childhood and early adulthood in The Man Who Loved Children and For Love Alone.

Briefly, she was educated at Sydney Girls High and Sydney Teachers College, worked for a short while as a teacher, did some university courses, worked as a typist in a factory to save up to go to England, sailing in 1928. In London she began living with her boss, Bill Blake, her partner for the rest of their lives.

From 1930-35 they lived in Paris where Blake (a Communist!) was employed as a merchant banker and where they were at least on the fringes of the Modernist set around Sylvia Beach’s bookshop Shakespeare and Company, the publishers of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).

Before leaving Sydney Stead unsuccessfully offered a collection of short stories to Angus & Robertson. By 1933 or 4 she had completed Seven Poor Men of Sydney but publisher Peter Davies asked for something more conventional to go first. She gave him her (updated) short stories framed as The Salzburg Tales, both coming out in 1934.

I have recently read Drusilla Modjeska’s Stravinsky’s Lunch (1999) which is about in particular the different careers of Sydney modernist painters Stella Bowen (1893-1947) and Grace Cossington Smith (1892-1984). There are many parallels with the careers of Stead and, say, Eleanor Dark (1901-1985). All were pioneering modernists brought up in Sydney. Of each pair, one spent her whole career abroad, one entirely at home. It is likely that none of the four met (unless Stead met Bowen in Paris) and yet all, over time, have proved influential. Sydney between the Wars might have been a second Paris, but the arts scene was dominated by the misogynistic Sydney Push and the women, far more talented, as time would prove, stayed home in the suburbs or went abroad (see Modjeska’s Exiles at Home, 1981).

Seven Poor Men of Sydney is not autofiction but Stead situates the story in the environment of her early twenties – the fishing/commuting community at Watson’s Bay; the streets of inner Sydney, out to the University; the dingy little houses, factories and meeting places of the poorer inner suburbs; public lectures, meetings of striking workers and communists; church. I did not think Stead was brought up Catholic but for whatever reason Catholicism and church attendance are on ongoing presence.

The novel is centred on a few months in the life of Joseph Bagenault, a practising Catholic living with his parents in Fisherman’s Bay (Watsons Bay), employed in the city as a printer, wishing that he were better educated, desperately poor – this is at the peak of the Depression. The people around him are Catherine and Michael, his cousins, whose parents live on the other side of the Harbour after coming into money; Baruch, Winter and Withers, fellow workers at the (failing) printing works; Marion and Fulke Folliot, married, middle class, communists; Kol Blount who is paralysed from the waist down, his mother’s home a meeting place for the others.

Michael has returned from WWI shell-shocked, unsettled; often sleeping rough, or at friend’s, especially Blount’s; unable to hold down a job; still interested in Marion Folliot with whom he had an affair in London during the War. Catherine his sister is younger, looks up to him, and also spends nights wandering the city, attending meetings, sleeping in parks.

In an interview reprinted in the Australian Womens Weekly (9 March 1935) Stead says: “My purpose, in making characters somewhat eloquent, is the expression of two psychological truths; first, that everyone has a wit superior to his everyday wit, when discussing his personal problems … ; second, that everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, is a fountain of passion, which is turned by circumstances of birth or upbringing into conventional channels” (Wiki)

This is to say that Stead’s characters talk eloquently and at length; that the great strengths of her subsequent works may be seen developing here; that the story is carried forward on the passionate speech of her characters.

Seven Poor Men of Sydney is of its times. There is a continuity with the crowded inner Sydney streets of Louis Stone’s Jonah (1911) through to, say Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South (1948). But you may also feel the pressure that Ulysses and the advent of Modernism put on all subsequent novels in Joseph and Michael and Catherine walking endlessly, alone or with friends, through night-time streets, our attention focused on their monologues (interior and exterior) and arguments.

“If we could do everything we had a mind to,” remarked Catherine, “if bread grew on trees, no one would recognise his brother or lover: we’d be a race of angels. You struggle and struggle for years to make a place for yourself, to work out your destiny, to justify yourself, and at the end nothing is right. You find yourself in a false position even with your friends, even with your co-workers.”
They passed along the lower path in the outer Domain opposite Garden Island. In a cave two unemployed men, rolled in newspapers, lay behind the embers of a small fire.
Fulke threw out his hand gracefully.
“Can’t help it, we’ll never be free. My secret thought is – but I never tell Marion this – this struggle will never cease. It will go on generation after generation…”

They talk and meet and argue. Eventually, Joseph finds comfort elsewhere, Catherine commits herself to an asylum, the printery closes down, Baruch departs for America, the group’s time is over.

.

Christina Stead, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, first pub. 1934. My edition Imprint Classics, 1990. 319pp Cover Illustration: Circular Quay, NSW (1925), Margaret Preston