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The forgotten women’s writing festivals by Susan Hawthorne

I’ve been involved in feminist writing, organising and publishing for around 35 years. In that time I’ve participated in numerous events around women’s, feminist and lesbian writing. I’ve attended international feminist book fairs, a conference on women’s writing in Israel, Sybylla readings, books launches, talked on radio, reviewed books and been published in lit mags and journals in many places. Given that this has been my life, I was somewhat surprised to be asked if there have ever been any women’s writers festivals in Australia?*

And I wondered, how soon forgotten we are.

Salon-A-Muse, March 1982-1985, Melbourne
This was a monthly gathering for feminist artists, writers, playwrights, musicians, comedians and others to present their work to women interested in the arts and culture. At the first meeting about half the potential audience had to be turned away with just 80 squeezing into a terrace house living room. The organisers changed venue several times with monthly audiences in the range of 100-200. It was an extraordinary culturally rich period which followed on from the Women’s Theatre and women’s rock bands of the 1970s. In Canberra Tilly’s became a focus for women’s cultural productions and performances.

Sydney, 1982: The Sydney Women Writers Festival, Seymour Centre
This weekend festival was the first writers’ festival I ever went to. It was an eye-opener to me, a budding writer with hardly any published work. There I heard Antigone Kefala, Anna Couani and met Robyn Rowland, Susan Hampton and Lee Cataldi for the first time. There were readings, writing workshops and panel sessions.

Melbourne, 31 August – 8 September 1985: The Language of Difference: Women Writers’ Week, Abbotsford Convent
In 1984 after being unemployed for 15 months, I applied for the job of the Writing, Theatre and Music Co-ordinator for the New Moods Festival. Part of Victoria’s 150^th invasion celebration. I put it that way because from the start I wanted to subvert the idea of Australia’s history of colonisation. On 26 February 1985, we had a one-off session in the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria, Doris Lessing Speaks. An event with 800 in the audience, 200 of which were standing-room only tickets.

In September 1985, after many meetings, lots of invitations sent out, the 9-day writers week took place. Opening with keynote addresses from Audre Lorde (USA) and Keri Hulme (NZ/Aotearoa) and session speakers such as Dorothy Hewett, Eva Johnson, Elizabeth Jolley, Hazel Rowley, T. Nappurula Nelson, Diane Bell, Sandra Shotlander and many others. The 9-day festival was filled with sessions on Aboriginal and Islander women’s writing, migration and the mother tongue, class and literature, erotic and lesbian writing as well as sessions on publishing, scriptwriting, experimental writing, the feminist aesthetic and about a dozen book launches. This event occurred a year before the inaugural Melbourne’s Writers’ Festival. An anthology, Difference: Writings by Woman was published and launched at the festival.

Australia wide, 1989 and 1991, Australian Feminist Book Fortnight, 1-17 September 1989, 6-22 September 1991
This national festival of books and writers took two years to organise. On each occasion more than 200 events were held across the country – from Broome to Burnie, Whyalla to Wagga Wagga – as well as multiple events in every capital city. I can’t find the full programs but on one A4 photocopied page there were 31 events in Sydney alone with writers such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Marele Day, Ruby Langford, Dale Spender, Maxine Hong Kingston (USA), Luisa Valezuela (Argentina), Janette Turner Hospital, Beth Yahp, Drusilla Modjeska and more. Part of the purpose of the Fortnight was to promote books written by women to booksellers. To this end we produced 15,000 catalogues containing information about approximately 300 books. Of the 300, 20 were chosen as Feminist Fortnight Favourites and had prominence in a coloured insert in the catalogue. We also produced a double A4 poster with those 20 books reproduced in colour. The catalogues and posters were distributed to bookshops around Australia (in the first year by Penguin, in the second by Random House). Booksellers created window displays, some ran events and readings as well. I recall that the regional events were incredibly popular and in Broome 200 people turned up to the event. I have no idea of the total size of the audience, but it was certainly many thousands.

Melbourne, 27-31 July 1994: 6^th International Feminist Book Fair: Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Writing and Publishing, Exhibition Buildings
In 1992 a group of us put together a bid to take to the 5^th International Feminist Book Fair in Amsterdam to hold the next IFBF in Melbourne. I presented the bid and we won it. Previous International Feminist Book Fairs had been run in London (1984), Oslo (1986), Montreal (1988), Barcelona (1990) and Amsterdam (1992). Renate Klein had been involved in the 1^st IFBF in London, and the London event had been an inspiration for the 1985 Women Writers’ Festival. With Renate’s input in Australia and having attended Montreal, Barcelona and Amsterdam, we were in a good position to organise this event. It was held over 5 days. The first two days were industry days to allow publishers to sell rights and share information with one another, followed by three public days. Over 200 writers participated coming from many countries including China, Kenya, Trinidad and Tobago, Vanuatu, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, Aboriginal Australia, Romania, Vietnam and publishers from New Zealand/Aotearoa, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Egypt, Spain, Germany, Canada, USA, India and more. Our estimate is that 23,000 people attended. There were book launches and panel session, readings and workshops, as well as the book displays of at least 100 exhibitors. Most events were at the Exhibition Buildings but Mietta’s and other venues also became places of feminist writing and performance. Sadly, there were no more IFBFs after Melbourne. The 6^th IFBF produced a sampler booklet of work by around half of the attending writers, 46 international writers and 53 Australian. The anthology, Flying Bookies: International Feminist Writers edited by Sandy Jeffs and Natasha Treloar, was named after Judy Horacek’s cartoon characters which had been produced initially for the AFBF and subsequently on materials for the IFBF.

In addition to these events, I know of a number of small festivals run to highlight the work of women writers. The Lynx Festival in Footscray (late 1982, I think) was one of them. I’m sure there have been others in other parts of Australia.

Story Passions, 3-5 March 2006, North Melbourne Town Hall
The most recent large event I organised was the 15^th birthday celebration for Spinifex Press, Story Passions, which took place from Friday to Sunday with forty writers and performers. It began with a panel session on the future of feminism, followed with sessions by novelists, playwrights and poets, by activists, and writers whose focus is politics and health. On the Saturday night six performers presented Swirl which included theatre, monologue, aerials and opera. Sue Ingleton closed the event on Sunday with her wonderful comedy. All sessions were videoed.

This morning a friend told me she had found in a shop, with a closing down sale, a cup engraved with the words: Women’s Art Fair, 1907.

It is all too easy to forget the amazing events that women have organised. On the whole they (we) are written out of history. The Feminist Book Fortnights began in the UK following the 1^st International Feminist Book Fair in 1984, Australia picked up the baton, New Zealand’s Listener Women’s Book Festival carried on in the 1990s, and in the mid-1990s, US feminist publishers began creating joint catalogues of feminist writing. In India today, there is a thriving feminist publishing scene, and such presses exist in many places we don’t ever get to hear about.

There are many names left out of this brief run-down, my apologies to all, you are not forgotten. It would be fantastic to get women around Australia to write up similar events that occurred in different states.

Susan Hawthorne was the Writing, Theatre and Music Co-ordinator for the New Moods Festival in 1985. She was a member of the Management Committee of the AFBF from 1988 to 1991 and Chair of the 6^th IFBF Management Committee from 1992 to 1996. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, a novel and two works of non-fiction. She is currently Adjunct Professor in the Writing Program at James Cook University, Townsville and Publisher at Spinifex Press which she and Renate Klein co-founded in 1991.

Susan was recently interviewed by Rob Kennedy on Guys Read Gals blog here.

* This question was posed to AWW by Michaela Bolzan, Creative Director of the Rose Scott Women Writers’ Festival, which will be held in Sydney on July 20.

6 Comments

by gongyla on May 6, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in Article

Tagged women's festivals, women's writing

Posted by gongyla on May 6, 2013

http://australianwomenwriters.com/2013/05/06/the-forgotten-womens-writing-festivals-by-susan-hawthorne/

Gender bias in literary reviewing: VIDA Count 2012

It’s International Women’s Day this Friday, March 8, and the count is in.

According to VIDA – Women in Literary Arts, several prestigious literary journals improved their representation of work by women in 2012, including The Boston Review, Threepenny and Poetry. But what of Harpers, The Paris Review, The New Republic, New York Review Of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The Nation and The Atlantic?

The graphics speak for themselves.*

*Note: some of the selected charts above refer to a breakdown of the number of authors whose books were reviewed; others refer to, and are labelled as, “overall” contributions by men and women. The complete VIDA Count for 2012 can be found here.

Despite the VIDA count being in its third year, it’s obvious the trend of ignoring both books by women and women contributors has continued. Gender bias is real and it affects more than the careers and livelihoods of talented female writers. Ultimately it affects the way cultures are shaped and what gets recorded as history.

What can we do?

According to the VIDA group, “Improvements will happen with effort, not accidentally or by ignoring the glaring disparities”. They advise:

Count your bookshelves… Write seriously about works by women. Solicit and commission writing by women. Consider race, gender, sexuality, and other identity categories as well.
(Source: VIDA site: Frequently Asked Questions.)

To this, we’d add: contribute to reading and reviewing challenges such as the Australian Women Writers Challenge, Global Women of Color and the newly created South-Asian Women Writers Challenge (more about this soon).

Follow these challenges on Twitter, Facebook and GoodReads and tweet using their respective hashtags. Look up the reviews of books already reviewed for the AWW challenge and take the time to comment. Mention what you’re doing – and why – to your friends and acquaintances. Get your local librarians, booksellers, and school and university teachers involved.

Even if traditional modes of reviewing continue to fail women, that doesn’t mean we’re powerless. Together we can help to create a global online reading community which takes women and women’s writing seriously. And if you have any other ideas how to help, let us know.

4 Comments

by Elizabeth Lhuede on March 5, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in Article, Genre bias, News

Tagged Australian women writers, books, goodreads, literature, south asian women

Posted by Elizabeth Lhuede on March 5, 2013

http://australianwomenwriters.com/2013/03/05/vida-count-2012/

Sleeping Beauties: Reviving Australia’s forgotten women writers

In lieu of a monthly wrap-up, my offering is a belated write-up of an event held at the State Library of New South Wales last December. My co-blogger, Sue Terry, will post a wrap-up of literary fiction and classics next week.

Sleeping Beauties: Reviving Australia’s forgotten women writers featured author/academic Jane Gleeson-White and author/Chief Literary Critic of the Australian Geordie Williamson in discussion. The chair was journalist and ABC broadcaster/producer Cassie McCullough.

Australian women writers were operating as subversives within the field of Australian literature as it is determined by a small and narrow clique and they are interesting and more interesting to us today, precisely because they did. Geordie Williamson

The focus of this discussion was the familiar, recurring story of Australian women writers who, for various reasons, struggled to find a path to publication. Many had their work heavily edited by male editors, and several only found their way to publication overseas. We heard about their frustrations, their difficult lives, their determination, their successes and failures. Many of their stories can be found in books written by the presenters: Geordie Williamson’s The Burning Library and Jane Gleeson-White’s Australian Classics: 50 Great writers and their celebrated works.

The conversation opened with a reference to Jane Gleeson-White’s declaration in an Overland blog post that 2012 was the year of women writers. Explaining that with the establishment of the Stella prize and the Australian Women Writers Challenge, Jennifer Mills’s article on Classics and the domination of the fiction awards by Anna Funder and Gillian Mears, she felt that we were experiencing a “sea change”.

In response to a question from McCullough about whether outsiders have a keener eye for cultural products than residents, Williamson, who was born in Australia, went on to give us quite a personal insight into his background and how he came to write The Burning Library.

Speaking about his experience as “an outsider”, he described the period of his life where he spent five years doing postgraduate research in English literature in England. “I’m a really shocking academic,” he said. Having discovered that, he went to work for a bookseller and dealt with manuscript materials and rare books. Says Williamson: “I found myself living in the West Country, pretending to write a thesis, walking the dog along this shingly beach and thinking ‘what am I doing?’ I feel so homesick. I found a copy of Martin Boyd’s The Cardboard Crown in a little shop and took it up to the The Undercliff.” Set in Australia and England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, The Cardboard Crown is about an upper middle-class family who love both countries but are not quite at home in either. This revelatory read inspired Williamson to focus on Australian literature when he returned to Australia to become a full-time literary reviewer. “A presiding spirit of my book is Drusilla Modjeska,” he said and described her book Exiles at Home: Australian women writers 1925-1945 as “a crucial work of cultural history.”

“Australian Literature and Australian Women’s literature is constantly under threat and exists in a state of crisis and I’ve come to the conclusion that that is its natural state. My book emerged out of a sense that it is embattled; that there are great problems in the way it is taught, published and disseminated and that there are problems generally in the reading community in terms of getting the information out there and raising enthusiasm levels,” he said.

An important thread of the evening’s discussion was one of the main obstacles faced by Australian women writers of a certain period: the masculine, bush tradition in Australian literature which was championed by the editor of the Bulletin, AG Stephens. Gleeson-White briefed the audience on this. “Masculine culture came about in the 1890s with the Bulletin and the first coherent promotion of a national literary culture even though we weren’t a nation yet. AG Stephens promoted this ‘bush writing’ to distinguish it from English and American literature. He published Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson and so on. Although he didn’t publish My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin, he did declare her book to be ‘the first Australian novel’ and it was published in the year of Federation in 1901.”

Gleeson-White says that she was not motivated to write her book on Australian Classics by a desire to promote women or men. “I wanted to give an accessible overview of Australian Literature and to make available to anyone who hadn’t studied it at university, some way in to literary culture which wasn’t a dense textbook,” she said. “I found it fascinating how many early women writers couldn’t find publication here. That includes Miles Franklin. The part of their work which was considered ‘too feminine’ was excised.”

As Gleeson-White went on to explain, a prime example of this is The Chosen Vessel by Barbara Baynton—a story about a woman living alone on her selection. “AG Stephens, Editor of the Bulletin published the story but omitted the second part. He left the first part, the realist bush part in but ‘excised’ the supernatural, religious overtones of the second part of the story, leaving in the bush realism to fit his vision for the Bulletin.”

It was very heartening to hear that after some hardship, Barbara Baynton’s story ended well. She and her squatter husband lived on a selection in the bush. When he left her for the maid, she moved to Sydney with her children. She then met her second husband, a wealthy doctor, who was well connected to the literary world and she began to write. No one in Australia would publish her short story collection. When her husband died, leaving her well-off, she went to London and happened to meet the critic/editor Edward Garnett, who had published Henry Lawson and others and was connected to the Bloomsbury circle. He loved all her stories and published them as they were as Bush Studies. I loved Gleeson-White’s description of Baynton as “a grand literary dame” living the high life, dressed to the nines and driving around in flash cars.

Judith Wright—one of Australia’s greatest poets had a similar experience, said Gleeson-White. Clem Christesen , founder of Meanjin, published her first book of poetry, The Moving Image. It was very successful critically, and in terms of sales. Wright sent him her second book of poems (Woman to Man), which she had written after having met and fallen in love with a man for the first time. “They were very intimate poems about her body, about pregnancy, about being a woman,” she said. “And she wrote to him saying ‘not sure if you’ll like this lot’. Well he didn’t like ‘this lot’ and he didn’t publish it because it was ‘so female-centered’. It was published eventually but didn’t do as well and one critic said it was ‘alienating for men’. It was AG Stephens who called Barbara Baynton ‘too obstetric’.”

M Barnard Eldershaw was next on the list but as Williamson explained, this was actually a formidable, two-woman writing team consisting of Marjorie Barnard (who, along with Christina Stead, was one of Patrick White’s favourite writers) and Flora Eldershaw. They wrote together because there was no literary community.

“This pair emerge out of the conditions Jane has described,” Williamson said. “We had a limited literary network at the beginning of Federation. It permitted women inside its ring- fenced circle but they had to be ‘sympatico’. Miles [Franklin] is fascinating in this regard because she takes on a lot of the rhetoric of the Bulletin school but we now have to recuperate her as something else. We read only one half of her experience,” he said.

Both writers went to the University of Sydney and Barnard graduated with First-class Honours and the university medal in History. She was offered a scholarship at Oxford but her father, a strict Presbyterian, prevented her from going. She stayed at home to care for her parents and became a librarian (topping library examinations in 1921). “A noble undertaking but it was for her a crippling time,” says Williamson. “Life is banked up in me for miles and miles,” she once wrote in a letter.

Barnard and Eldershaw wrote historical novels together. Williamson says that despite their writing seeming to be “very obedient to the norms of realism laid down by the Bulletin school”, the concerns of their novels are not with the “masculine realm of outward endeavour” but with the “feminine”. Williamson says an example of this is the mercantile, rags to riches story about the rise of a British merchant, A House is Built (which won the pair the Bulletin Prize in 1928). “The men are lost, outside the novel’s frame,” he says.

And as the years go on, it is increasingly the social and domestic worlds which are at the heart of their novels. “And this seems radical and wonderfully sneaky. This is what inspired Patrick White’s vision of early Sydney and this is what White writes about—the feminine interior, the world of women as a place of wonder and bizarre, majestic otherness.” In this regard, Williamson asked us to think about the opening chapters of The Vivisector.

Williamson says when he was trying to do a 50/50 gender split of men and women writers for his book, it was easier to find women who “undermined the traditional, gendered version of Australian Literature laid down because the men were very much stuck in the realist, masculinist, rural mode.” He is not saying that he doesn’t like the men’s books or that they are not worthy of “recuperation”. Rather that: “Because they were moving in the direction of more national and political ideological currents, they were more obedient to them, they were more like propagandists than writers of literature in the way we think of it today.” He gave the example of Frank Dalby Davison (Man Shy, Dusty).

Williamson explained that as M Barnard Eldershaw went on to write more sophisticated books incorporating philosophy and modernism, and they became increasingly unpopular and more negatively reviewed.

As time went on, Barnard tended to write fiction (eventually writing her book of stories The Persimmon Tree), whereas Eldershaw wrote non-fiction Together, they produced a landmark volume of Australian criticism, Essays in Australian Fiction and wrote the first essays on Christina Stead and Henry Handel Richardson.

Williamson says that their vision was extraordinary for their times, the 1930s. “That there might in fact be a national literature, it might include women and that women might in fact be the preeminent practitioners.”

When introducing Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, Barnard’s last book published in 1947, Williamson said it was written mostly on her own and it was heavily censored by the government because of its left-wing, anti-war stance. Barnard had joined the ALP and was an avowed pacifist. Many cuts were made to the book and this seriously affected its flow. It was republished uncensored in 1983, again fell out of print and Patrick White said it was one of the great Australian novels.

Gleeson-White then sang the praises of one of her favourite novels (along with Voss and Carpentaria): Maurice Guest by Henry Handel Richardson. A gifted pianist, scholar, and translator, Henry Handel Richardson went to Leipzig to study as a music student and married a philologist she met there; he adored and promoted her. She was the first translator of Ibsen into English and James Joyce, an admirer of Ibsen, bought a copy of the book.

Says Gleeson-White: “She was this freaky, brilliant woman who read Freud in the original, before he was known to be a genius. She was obsessed with Wagner, steeped in European literature and music. All of that feeds into Maurice Guest. It is the most fantastic, overblown passionate novel, a devastating Wagnerian love story. There is poor hapless Maurice, the piano student, vying for the love of an Australian girl with the genius violinist, Nietzschean superman.”

It’s interesting as Gleeson-White says Henry Handel Richardson’s best known and loved stories are the ones based in Australia like The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, which are part of what she describes as the “nation building canon”. She was very pleased to say that Maurice Guest has just come back into print (published by as part of the Text Classics series).

Discussion moved on to Christina Stead who was only reviewed once, and negatively, in the 2012 AWW Challenge. This was surprising to quite a few Challenge participants so it was interesting to hear Williamson say that he believed that the difficulty of being the expatriate as it applies to Maurice Guest applies to Christina Stead’s entire career and may help to partly explain her lack of appeal.

Many great critics have praised her as one of Australia’s and the 20^th century’s greatest writers. She won the inaugural Patrick White prize and White set it up with her in mind. Stead in a letter to a friend says “my credo is intelligent ferocity”. And Williamson says she wrote like that during her entire career.

McCullough quoted from Jonathan Franzen’s piece on The Man Who Loved Children in which he calls it a “masterpiece” but also says: “I suspect that one reason The Man Who Loved Children remains exiled from the canon is that Christina Stead’s ambition was to write not ‘like a woman’ but ‘like a man’: her allegiances are too dubious for the feminists, and she’s not enough like a man for everybody else.”

There was a slight digression here as Williamson apologised “as a man” for Jonathan Franzen saying that the author had “jumped the shark in literary terms” when conversation turned to Franzen’s comments about Edith Wharton in his essay Rooting Interest: Edith Wharton and the Problem of Sympathy.

Angela Carter said: “To open a book, any book, by Christina Stead and read a few pages is to be at once aware that one is in the presence of greatness.” Williamson asks: why is it then that, according to Nielsen Bookscan, she sold 199 books in 2008, and was taught on only one university course (For Love Alone at the University of Queensland). Williamson identifies two points: “She lived in Europe, America, and the UK. She never had an established relationship with any particular locale, or class or language group. She was an exile in the best 20^th century tradition. And since she was married to a Jewish, communist stockbroker, the 20^th century was not kind to them on either side of the Atlantic.”

He says that Stead’s reception was very much marred by the fact that she was unwilling to accept certain “boundaries” (she didn’t like being edited or editing her work). “She is our great genius, she wrote like no one else, she is a figure of world literature and her greatness is something which we don’t actually respect. We like our modernism light; we like our Booker novels well-tended, well-edited and we don’t want to be so ‘furiously explained’, with the great terrors of existence. It’s too much and she is too much and that’s why she’s such a splendid writer and it’s probably why it’s so hard to get people to read her,” he said.

Gleeson-White agreed that Christina Stead is not “easy reading” saying that she tried many times to read The Man Who Loved Children before she succeeded and finds Ulysses easier to read. She’s not even sure she likes The Man Who Loved Children although she loves Christina Stead.

It was suggested that Christina Stead “beach reads” would be For Love Alone or The Salzburg Tales described by Williamson as “folktales retold by a brilliant young woman who has just arrived in London who is going to set the literary alight. Everybody says it’s spectacular. The review in the New Yorker said it’s better than The Decameron.”

And what of Amy Witting? She was the first Australian writer to sell two stories to the New Yorker and when they asked for another, she refused because her second one had been edited without her knowledge. Williamson told us that Kenneth Slessor who had published her first story in Southerly said to Thea Astley (who was working as a teacher with Witting at the time): “Tell her I would publish any word she wrote.”

Says Williamson: “Her story is the story of how hard it is to become a writer as a woman in the 20^th century. You won’t find her on university courses or in print. She is not in the Macquarie Pen Anthology of Australian Literature.”

Recommending her novella I for Isobel which features the character Isobel, (who also appears in some stories and in a later novel Isobel on the way to the Corner Shop), he says Witting’s first novel wasn’t published until quite late in her life. Despite being called “the Australian Chekov”, her publisher didn’t agree and wouldn’t publish her in paperback. I for Isobel was set to be published when sales staff decided against it.

She was a teacher and may never have been published had it not been for one of her students who became a literary figure in London and shopped her manuscript around. Amy Witting’s work was recognised with the Patrick White Award in 1993 and she was posthumously awarded an AM in 2002.

Williamson concluded by saying: All these people are our Sleeping Beauties but Amy Witting is in “suspended animation”.

List of writers (I’ve no doubt missed some):

Drusilla Modjeska

Judith Wright

Barbara Baynton

Miles Franklin

Marjorie Barnard

Flora Eldershaw

M Barnard Eldershaw

Frank Dalby Davison

Patrick White

Henry Handel Richardson

Christina Stead

Amy Witting

Further reading:

Our Common Ground by Geordie Williamson

What we talk about when talk about Australian literature Kerryn Goldsworthy on Text Classics

Auto da Fé Nicolas Jose on The Burning Library by Geordie Williamson

Write-up of this event by John from Musings of a Literary Dilettante who was also there but unlike me, wrote it up promptly!

About Me

I’m a freelance book reviewer, journalist, editor and librarian. I blog over at Wordsville and you can find me on Twitter @PaulaGrunseit

11 Comments

by Paula on February 5, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in Article

Tagged 2013 AWW challenge, Australian women writers

Posted by Paula on February 5, 2013

http://australianwomenwriters.com/2013/02/05/sleeping-beauties-reviving-australias-forgotten-women-writers/

2012 AWW Challenge Wrap-up: History, Biography, Memoir

In 2012 the Australian Women Writers’ Challenge time machine travelled from fifteenth century Venice to contemporary Australia. We ventured around the world, dropping in at Mogmog in the Pacific; Bangladesh; Spain; and Mt. Wellington in Tasmania. It demonstrated that Australian women authors are a diverse group of people writing about a broad variety of subjects.

What is history? I take a very broad approach to this question. Basically if it is an attempt to truthfully depict something that actually happened in the past then I embrace it as a history. What is truth? I leave that up to you to decide. A biography or memoir relates the story of what has happened to a person in the past – perhaps only the quite recent past. That is history. Bernadette Bean drew attention to the sub-genre of true crime in her Crime, Mystery, Suspense and Thriller roundup. If the history of crime interests you I suggest you read her post. Some histories and biographies were also included in the Literary Fiction and Non-Fiction wrap-up.

Over one hundred histories, biographies and memoirs were reviewed for the Challenge during 2012. The following overview will only discuss a fraction of them. A survey of the list reveals that Challenge participants prefer to read about the recent past. Most of the books reviewed were about the history of our lifetime, ie post World War II. Understandably most books are about Australian history but this is not limiting. Australian history covers a vast array of topics and includes people from nearly everywhere in the world.

Australian History

The most reviewed AWW book in this category for 2012.

The most reviewed book in the history, biography and memoir category for 2012.

The most reviewed book in this category for the Challenge in 2012 was Am I Black Enough for You?, a personal account of life and identity written by successful Aboriginal author, Anita Heiss. You can read Jessica White’s overview of these reviews in the Diversity wrap-up. Other books by Aboriginal authors that have been reviewed for the Challenge are:

Kick the Tin by Doris Kartinyeri (reviewed by Marilyn Brady),
Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington (reviewed by Anne Marie),
Auntie Rita by Rita and Jackie Huggins (reviewed by Marilyn Brady),
Too Many Tears by Heather Vicenti and Deborah Dickman (reviewed by Kate Rizzetti),
My Bundjalung People by Ruby Langford Ginibi (reviewed by Marilyn Brady), and
My Place by Sally Morgan (reviewed by Marilyn Brady).

These books all focussed on life for Aboriginal people in the twentieth century. In 2013 I am hoping to find some histories of Australia’s early settlement and the nineteenth century written by Aboriginal authors.

I agree with Jessica White who wrote in her 2012 wrap-up about diversity that she would like to see more Australian Women Writers Challenge (AWW) reviews of books by Aboriginal authors. Seven histories, biographies and memoirs written by Aboriginal authors have been reviewed for AWW in 2012. If it was not for Marilyn Brady’s reviews there would been only four books by Aboriginal authors reviewed by Challenge participants. I am sure we can read more in 2013.

Australian historians, generally of Anglo-Celtic background, are highly regarded worldwide for their handling the history of indigenous and non-indigenous relations. Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers, reviewed by Marilyn Brady, is a landmark work and is required reading for some university history courses as well as being an enjoyable read. I was surprised that there were not more reviews of books about relations between Aborigines and settlers during the colonial era given that Australian historians have been producing so much work in this area over the last twenty or thirty years.

Other aspects of the history of Europeans in Australia was also covered by AWW reviewers. Paula Grunseit reviewed a book about a bushranger in Carol Baxter’s Captain Thunderbolt and His Lady. Janine Rizzetti carefully analysed Derelie Cherry’s biography of an early Colonial Secretary of New South Wales, Alexander Mcleay. The story of Scottish convicts serving time in the Female Factory on the slopes of Mt. Wellington in Tasmania was reviewed by Lauren Murphy and Paula Grunseit. If you like the air of a mystery then you may enjoy a book reviewed by Jean Bedford about a reclusive woman living in nineteenth century Newtown, Sydney. Alternatively Penny Russell’s book about manners, identity and social status in Australia during the nineteenth century and until the outbreak of World War I might interest you (reviewed by Jenny Schwartz and Paula Grunseit).

Published in 1959 this was the oldest book reviewed in 2012.

Published in 1959 this was the oldest book reviewed for the Challenge in 2012.

Two books provide the bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Stephanie Campisi writes an enticing review of the biography of Melbourne confectioner Macpherson Robertson, the inventor of the Cherry Ripe and Freddo Frog. “If this book were a type of confectionery, its recipe would be one part rags to riches, one part Richard Branson, and one part Willy Wonker” she writes. Marilyn Brady received quite a different view of Australian history while reading Mary Durack’s Kings in Grass Castles. This history about pioneering pastoralists, the Durack family, was written in 1959. The story continued in Brenda Niall’s recently published biography of the Durack sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, which was reviewed by Sue on her Whispering Gums blog.

Challenge participants did not read many books that focussed on the first half of the twentieth century. Narelle Harris reviewed a book about Melbourne when it was the capital city of Australia between 1901 and 1927. Melissa Watts commented that the autobiography of writer, Dulcie Deamer was “a great insight into Sydney of the 1920s”. Katie Holmes’ exploration of Australian women’s diaries in the 1920s and 1930s was recommended by Marilyn Brady.

History is for all age groups. Two children’s histories were reviewed for AWW in 2012. Paula Grunseit praised Christobel Mattingley’s book, My Father’s Islands: Abel Tasman’s heroic voyages, which is written for children. Louise enjoyed Who Explored Australia? Blaxland, Lawson, Wentworth, Evans and Strzelecki. There are many children’s histories published in Australia. It would be good to see more of them reviewed in 2013.

History of the Living Memory

Four reviewers enjoyed this book.

History is what happened yesterday, literally. The history of our time is well represented in the books that were reviewed in 2012. I will mention only a few here. Marieke Hardy’s You’ll be Sorry When I am Dead attracted four favourable AWW reviews (Kate Rizzetti, Mareelouise, Maggie Dad and Sue Luus). Jessica White reviewed a memoir by Krissy Kneen through which mores about female sexuality are explored. Tim McGuire enjoyed the account of Brisbane during the 1980s and 1990s in Sally Breen’s The Casuals.

Diversity is an important element in the fabric of Australian society and Challenge participants recognised this. Jo Tamar reviewed Alice Pung’s memoir, Unpolished Gem, about growing up as an Australian of Asian descent. Tamar praised Pung’s “impeccable” writing and found that it helped her to understand her Asian friends better.

Australia has been a refuge for many people who suffered the horrors of the twentieth century. AWW reviewers Maree Kimberley and James Tierney were moved by Pung’s subsequent book, Her Father’s Daughter, which explored her family history in the killing fields of Cambodia. Readers can learn about the experiences of Vietnamese making the dangerous journey to Australia in Boat People: Personal Stories from the Vietnam Exodus 1975-96 which was reviewed by Monique Mulligan (scroll down). Last year Holocaust survivor, Halina Wagowska, published The Testimony, an account of surviving the Holocaust and her subsequent life. This attracted the attention of three AWW reviewers, Maree, Janine Fitzpatrick and Stephanie Campisi.

Challenge participants also read about the lives of Australian Muslims. AWW reviewers, Amra Pajalic and Sally, enjoyed Arwa El Masri’s memoir and felt that her book helped to clarify some misunderstandings about Islam. Kevin Rennie reviewed the memoir of Somali Muslim, Mariam Issa, who writes about her life in Africa and the events that led her to settle in the Melbourne bayside suburb of Brighton.

The Australian Women Writers Challenge has something for everybody. If reading books about entertainers is something you enjoy then you can read reviews about entertainers such as the comedian from Alice Springs, Fiona O’Loughlin (reviewed by Shelleyrae). The books of another comedian, Judith Lucy, were reviewed by Shelleyrae and Paula Grunseit (review of audiobook version). Simone found Dannii Minogue’s memoir easy to read and absorbing. If you enjoyed the television series, The Farmer Wants a Wife, then you might want to read the memoir written by a participant on that show, Jo Fincham (reviewed by Helen McKenna). Perhaps punk rock is more your idea of entertainment? If so, you might be interested in reading The Ballroom: The Melbourne Punk And Post Punk Scene: A Tell All Memoir, reviewed by Adam Ford. You can find more books about entertainers by browsing through the list of AWW reviews of histories, biographies and memoirs.

Australian Women Write about the World

Of the books reviewed it is not surprising that the most common subject was Australians living in Australia. However, Australian writers also like to explore the world in their writing. Amra Pajalic reviewed Hanifa Deen’s biography about Bangladeshi human rights activist, Taslima Masreen, who had to flee her country and resettle in Sweden. Other books were memoirs of Australians who moved to another country. AWW reviewer Helen McKenna read about a West Australian family who set sail for a world tour only to crash on the island of Mogmog in the Pacific. It was Nellie Bennet’s passion for flamenco dancing that led her to move from Australia to Spain. Her memoir, Only in Spain, was reviewed by Jody Lee who thoroughly enjoyed it. In an unusual conclusion to her review of the same book Paula Grunseit advises readers to avoid practising the castanets while driving!

History of science is a thriving field but there were very few AWW reviews of books from this sub-genre. I reviewed two books that were shortlisted for many literary awards. Robin Arianrhod’s book, Seduced by Logic, is an account of two female mathematicians who were important to the Newtonian revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Double Entry, Jane Gleeson-White’s exploration of the history of double-entry book-keeping, focuses on fifteenth century Venetian merchants before tracing this system of accounting to modern times. Double-Entry earned Jane Gleeson-White the Waverley Library Award for literature. My reviews of these books are here and here.

The Reviewers

The strength of the Challenge is not only the number of reviews that have been written but the number of reviewers who participate. Sixty seven Challenge participants reviewed one hundred histories, biographies and memoirs in 2012. This creates a wonderful online community where people who enjoy reading books can find someone else to share their interest with, whether it be on Twitter, Facebook or Goodreads. There is a niche for everyone in the Australian Women Writers’ Challenge.

Paula Grunseit was the most prolific reviewer of histories, biographies and memoirs, writing thirteen reviews. Marilyn Brady, who lives in the United States, wrote nine AWW reviews despite facing some difficulties in getting her hands on some Australian books. Other reviewers who enjoyed reviewing books in this category during 2012 were Yvonne Perkins (six reviews), Helen McKenna and Heidi Reads (five reviews each).

Reviewing books is an opportunity to work on our craft of writing. A review can be bland or riveting. The best reviewers can entice people to read the review even if they have no interest in the book being reviewed. Recognition for passionate reviews must be given to Heidi Reads for her review of The Confession of an Unrepentant Lesbian Ex-Mormon by Sue-Ann Post and Elizabeth Lhuede’s review of The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement by Virginia Lloyd. Heidi demonstrates that a reader can be infuriated by a book, yet conclude that it is a wonderful read. Elizabeth wrote beautifully about a book that “sings of love and grief” and how she wept on the bus while reading it.

Australian women are very productive writers of histories, memoirs and biographies. I wish I could have discussed all the books that were reviewed. I encourage you to read some of the reviews that I did not include in this roundup by browsing through the list of books reviewed in 2012. This list has made the Australian Women Writers Challenge website a useful database for those who want to see what Australian women are writing in this genre. Twenty six of the books reviewed were published in 2012, yet there are many more published last year that still have not been reviewed. In the monthly posts about histories, biographies and memoirs which I will be writing this year I will bring your attention to new publications as well as those books that have been shortlisted for awards and books written by indigenous authors. I am looking forward to reading your reviews this year!

~~~~~~~~~~

About Me

I’m Yvonne Perkins. For the last few years I have been working as a research assistant on a variety of historical projects one of which was an investigation of the history of teaching reading in Australia. Currently I am researching the beliefs, religious or otherwise, of soldiers who served in World War I. In my spare time I enjoy reading history and writing about it on my blog, Stumbling Through the Past. I can also be found @perkinsy on twitter.

14 Comments

by perkinsy on January 17, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in Article, History, memoir, biography

Tagged Australian women writers, Indigenous literature

Posted by perkinsy on January 17, 2013

http://australianwomenwriters.com/2013/01/17/2012-aww-challenge-wrap-up-history-biography-memoir/

Jane Gleeson-White on 2012: The Year of Australian Women Writers

I declare 2012 the year of Australian women writers.

And I’m thanking the Stella Prize and the Australian Women Writers Challenge. And the happy chance that two novels by Australian women published this year have dominated the literary prizes: Anna Funder’s All that I Am, which won seven awards including the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and Gillian Mears’ Foal’s Bread, which won among others the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction.

Created in September 2011, partly in response to the all-male 2011 Miles Franklin Award shortlist, the Stella Prize came into its own this year. In 2012 the Stella has run a series of thought-, conversation- and blog-provoking events – and inspired many others.

Perhaps the most significant ‘event’ inspired by the Stella is Elizabeth Lhuede’s Australian Women Writers Reading and Reviewing Challenge (AWW), a flourishing website which reviews books written by Australian women created in late 2011. Since then, over 370 people have signed up to review books and so far they’ve generated 1250 reviews. Impressive stats.

As part of the AWW challenge Overland’s fiction editor Jennifer Mills read for the first time five Australian ‘classics’ written by women, which she reviewed last month. Mills wrote: ‘Knowing these women readers and writers have gone before makes me feel that I am part of an active culture, a living thing.’

The indefatigable Lhuede has just wrapped up the achievements of AWW so far at the Huffington Post, where she gives a fascinating overview of the books by women reviewed on the AWW blog this year.

The first thing that struck me on reading it was the range of genres it includes. As Lhuede says: ‘The reviews haven’t all been of literary fiction. They cover nonfiction and poetry, as well as genres that rarely, if ever, get reviewed by traditional media such as horror, romance and erotica.’ The genres covered include literary, classics, historical, crime, mystery, thriller, suspense, romance, sci-fi, fantasy, paranormal, young adult, history, memoir, biography. Comprehensive.

I’ve been thinking a lot about women writers this week in preparation for a Stella event at the State Library of New South Wales on Wednesday – Sleeping Beauties: Reviving Australia’s Forgotten Women Writers. I’ve been thinking especially about the ongoing marginalisation of women writers in Australia – and one word that keeps recurring is ‘genre’.

A Stella event in Sydney earlier this year asked ‘Do women write differently from men?’ Of course we don’t – the range of women writers and writing is as vast as that of men. But I can’t help feeling that something like an idea that women write (and read) differently from men lurks at the heart of the marginalisation of women writers in the prevailing western literary culture (as suggested by the VIDA statistics).

Sometimes this is overt, as in Times Literary Supplement’s editor Peter Stothard’s remark that ‘while women are heavy readers, we know they are heavy readers of the kind of fiction that is not likely to be reviewed in the pages of the TLS’. And other times subtle, as in Helen Garner’s comment on the Stella website, which has been bothering me all year: ‘The Stella Prize, with its graceful flexibility about genre, will encourage women writers to work in the forms they feel truly at home in, instead of having to squeeze themselves into the old traditional corsets.’

The question of genre was explored by Rebecca Giggs in the Spring 2012 issue of Overland in her essay ‘Imagining Women: On gender and genre’. Prompted by a question asked to Anna Krien about Into the Woods and why it was that the best nonfiction in the country was being written by women (Helen Garner, Margaret Simons, Chloe Hooper, Amanda Lohrey), Giggs teases out the terrain of these nonfiction writers who defy generic conventions. They ‘incur upon the narrative; they let the narrative trespass upon them. They use the lyric, the language of poetry, and swear and slang with equal grace.’ In her exhilarating conclusion, Giggs argues these genre-bending women write to destroy all traditional categories and boundaries, including those of gendered discourse: ‘In short, these are writers who use nonfiction to burn down the barriers between masculine and feminine discourse, inner and outer worlds, form and content.’

These questions of genre and gender have a particular inflection in Australian literary history which dates back to that formative decade, the 1890s, and the strongly masculine style of fiction – realism, bush tales, lean prose, laconic characters – championed by the Bulletin’s AG Stephens. This particular brand of Australian fiction has shaped our thinking about national literature and ‘the great Australian novel’ – and is reflected in many of the Miles Franklin shortlists, notably the sausagefest (thanks Angela Meyer) of 2011. The terms of Franklin’s will – that the novel ‘must present Australian Life in any of its phases’ – seem to encourage this.

Julieanne Lamond explores Australian women’s writing in the context of this history in her brilliant Meanjin essay, ‘Stella vs Miles: Women Writers and Literary Value in Australia’. Lamond draws on Susan Sheridan’s work on Australian women’s writing, saying that Sheridan ‘puts forward an account of the relationship between masculinity, genre, nation and literary worth that it seems to me might still be at play in judgements about women and literary value’. As Lamond tells it, Sheridan argues that during the 1890s and in subsequent accounts that upheld its values, ‘a set of ideas that came to define what it meant to be distinctively Australian were defined in opposition to a set of values that were identified with femininity and that ideas about what constitutes literary value in Australia are also gendered in favour of realism and the vernacular (a la Lawson and Rudd) as opposed to popular romance (a la Praed and Cambridge). These are of course false dichotomies but they have been compelling in discussions of Australian literature ever since the turn of the twentieth century.’

In my attempts to clarify my thinking about Australian women writers for the Stella event this week, I keep returning to the recent case of Kate Grenville and the different fates of her two historical novels, The Secret River (2005) and Sarah Thornhill (2011). Especially as it seems to me that, crudely speaking, the novels fall across the realism versus romance divide.

The Secret River (realism) won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and several others, and was shortlisted for most literary awards, including the Miles Franklin. In contrast, Sarah Thornhill (romance) has won one award and been shortlisted for four. It does not seem to have had the critical attention that The Secret River received. And yet for me, Grenville’s achievement in Sarah Thornhill is at least as great, if not greater, than her achievement in the earlier novel. Except that Sarah Thornhill’s is a subtle and unambiguously feminine achievement: Grenville has conjured from nowhere, almost, with very few archival records of early nineteenth-century women’s voices, the vivid voice of an early Australian colonial girl, woman, lover, wife, mother. The novel is told in the first person, from the constrained, socially restricted, uneducated viewpoint of a girl. Does such a voice carry weight in our broader Australian literary culture? Not much, it seems. Or not as much as a third person account of Sarah Thornhill’s pioneering, nation-making father, the protagonist of The Secret History.

I’ll be chewing over these questions and more on Wednesday night with Geordie Williamson.

This will be my last blog post for Overland. For the foreseeable future anyway. I’m riding off into the dawn to do some genre bending of my own.

This article by Jane Gleeson-White first appeared on Overland blog on 4 December 2012 and is reposted here with permission.

Jane Gleeson-White is a writer and editor with degrees in literature and economics. She’s a PhD student in creative writing and the author of Double Entry: how the merchants of Venice shaped the modern world : and how their invention could make or break the planet (2011), Australian Classics (2007) and Classics (2005). She blogs at bookish girl and tweets at @janeLGW. Double Entry has been reviewed for the challenge by Yvonne Perkins.

2 Comments

by Elizabeth Lhuede on December 10, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Article, Guest author, Literary, Classic, News

Tagged australian literature, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Elizabeth Lhuede, Huffington Post, Jane Gleeson-White, literary prizes, Overland, The Stella Prize

Posted by Elizabeth Lhuede on December 10, 2012

http://australianwomenwriters.com/2012/12/10/jane-gleeson-white-on-2012-the-year-of-australian-women-writers/

M D Brady on When Women Write about Women

Last January I was just beginning to blog, and I was interested in expanding my reading of books by and about women globally. I was particularly interested in the types of stories women write. Browsing for possible challenges to get me started, I found and signed up for the Australian Women Writers Challenge (AWW). I knew little about Australia, much less about Australian women writers.

Quickly I found helpful guidance on AWW, first on writings by Indigenous women writers, and then more generally from Australian bloggers who were reading irresistible books. I have ended up reading 22 books for AWW already this year, more than twice what I had intended. My reading led to the observations I make below. A longer version of this essay, which includes more books that are global examples of the patterns I discuss, appears on my blog.

When Women Write about Women

Novels by and about women are being published and recognized in ever increasing numbers. Are these books significant? What do these books say about women? What is traditional and what is new in these books? Should we consider them feminist writing? Although I am not a literary scholar or critic and not involved in the publishing industry, I am an avid novel reader. I care about these questions and wonder what they offer women in a changing world. I’d like to share my thoughts and possibly start a discussion about them.

What strikes me most strongly is the sheer variety of novels by women writers available today. Despite booksellers’ desires to market them as “women’s fiction”, the diversity of authors, plots and styles refuses to be ghettoized. Women’s novels remind us of the problem of lumping all women into any one definition. As long as we live in a gendered world, most men and most women will reflect a gendered difference in their writing. All authors write about what they know and gender is part of our experience. If men and women are to communicate, they need to read about each other.

Whether or not authors express and prioritize their own gender is their choice, not an inevitable result of their gender identity. Writing styles and subjects of male and female overlap. Some of the best recent writing by women does not reflect gendered sensitivity. Take, for example, novels by Australian Alexis Wright. Her Plains of Promise focuses on the experience of Indigenous women, but in her epic, Carpentaria, the narrative includes some forceful, interesting women characters, but centers on the lives of Indigenous men.

Of course, many women choose to embrace traditional roles and definitions in their plots and characters. The romance genre is alive and well among writers and readers, sometimes featuring strong women going after the man they want, not waiting passively for him. Novels featuring domestic life are also abundant and popular. This is as it should be. I would argue, however, that the attempts to ghettoize women’s writing in these genres are also misguided and belittling. Although some of the books in these genres may be simplistic, complex and compelling narratives about domesticity and romance are being written as well, which deserve the attention of both women and men. On the other hand, such novels often look to the past where some, but not all, women could live sheltered by the men they loved. Such novels do little to challenge the status quo or help women imagine alternatives. That is fine, but it is not feminism.

I am always hesitant to label novels as feminist. A basic component of feminism is that private lives are shaped by the public actions which determine economic and social structures. Feminism seeks to help individual women value themselves and consider their own interests; at the same time, it pushes for changes that make the larger world more fair and just for all women. Novels are great for exploring individual women’s sense of what it means to be a woman. When they try to analyse and address larger social problems, few succeed. One that does succeed is Finola Moorhead’s Remember the Tarantella. She has created a lesbian novel with deep meaning for all women about the possibilities of growing as individuals at the same time as belonging to a larger community.

The recent novels that interest me most are the ones I believe make a new, important contribution to literature by offering new narratives for women. I consider these as “women-centered” novels because they explore in new depth and variety what it means to be a woman. Although not explicitly feminist, they reflect changes and new options for women that have been emerging in the past thirty years. Their plots vary widely, and they encourage women to examine and value the parts of their lives often outside men’s notice, such as their bodies and their relationships with each other.

In 1989, acclaimed feminist scholar, Carolyn Heilbrun, wrote a book entitled Writing a Woman’s Life. In it she describes how we all live by the stories we tell about ourselves. She observes that the literary canon of the English-speaking people is full of plots featuring men engaging in various quests, but women are limited to romantic plots centering on a man in their lives. Even fine women authors like Jane Austen and George Eliot do not offer alternatives to this plot. Heilbrun urged women writers to create new plots that depicted women engaging in their own quests and telling about lives and events that did not depend on men choosing to care for them.

By the time she wrote this book, Heilbrun was already acting to correct this situation. In 1963, she had been a non-tenured professor at Columbia University in an English Department, not unanimously ready to treat a woman as an intellectual equal. She also had a husband and three young children. Writing under the pseudonym, Amanda Cross, she created a series of detective stories. Her lead character was Kate Fansler, a female professor like herself, but one without children. Fansler was sharp and witty and anything but nurturing or “womanly”. And she was extremely popular.

In the fifty years since Heilbrun created Kate Fansler, dozens of other women detective novels have followed. Other female sleuths include women, straight and lesbian, of every imaginable ethnicity, nationality, and class. Interestingly, some women struggle to combine their love for a partner and children with their professional ambitions and responsibilities. Part of their quests involves finding ways to be successful in what were once defined as the public and private spheres. Not many of us are going to go out and solve crimes, but their stories resonate with all of us who juggle careers and families, combining romance and quest plots.

Not all women’s new writing presents plots that are either quests or romances. “Coming of age” stories today deal more explicitly with girls’ physical changes and growing awareness of sexuality, but not necessarily marriage. Other recent books deal with midlife crises which require women to reinvent new life stories for themselves. Perhaps such stories could be classified as “coming of self”, since many women, in life or in novels, develop as individuals only after the loss of a marriage marks the end of their romance plot. Other crises can have the same effect. In these books a woman friend or a group of women offer alternative support.

Another way women writers are expanding our society’s conception of womanhood is the attention given to experiences that are typically those of women but not men. Traditionally these have been ignored by male writers and by literature in general. For example, menstruation has been a taboo, and when childbirth was included in a novel, readers have typically viewed it from the perspective of the anxious father in the waiting room. Today women’s experience of pregnancy and birth is described with relevant complexity. Since giving birth is a very human event, such accounts are a step toward the inclusion of woman in literature as fully human.

More generally, motherhood is being increasingly described from the perspective of the mother. Authors are writing about what it is like to raise small children and how the mother-child relationship changes as boys and girls grow up. While narratives of mothers and sons have been common in the past, today’s books often feature mother-daughter relations. My favorite is Francesca Rendle-Short’s Bite Your Tongue, published by the Australian Spinifex Press. This book is also unique in its inclusion of the physical nature of the relationship, another aspect of how women authors are changing how we think about women. Sisterhood is another popular new topic. Women’s friendships with each other are also being depicted and treated with dignity. In lesbian novels, a sexual dimension is also present.

Another change in publishing has been the growing availability of novels by and about women from varied backgrounds. Thirty years ago, novels in the libraries and bookstores in the United States were routinely by white authors, or occasionally by men of color. As readers and publishers have realized the quality and significance of women writing globally, books by women of color and other groups silenced in our traditional cultures are relatively easy to find. Women still are discriminated against in the publishing and reviewing (as the VIDA study reported by AWW shows) but the situation is improving. As more books by women about themselves get read by men and women, some men are also writing with more depth and sensitivity about women.

At the forefront of the increased prominence of books by and about diverse women are the feminist presses that specialize in making them available. The Spinifex Press in Australia produces a fine array of such books, fiction and nonfiction, many of them by global women.

Women writing about what it means to be a woman are offering new stories that move beyond stereotypes which are no longer adequate. Their novels are varied and significant because they expand our understanding of what it means to be human.

To ignore or denigrate novels because they are by women or deal with their lives slightingly is to continue the traditional assumptions that humanity is synonymous with manhood. Although not all novels by and about women are explicitly feminist, many treat women’s lives as significant and help us imagine new stories for ourselves. And this, after all, is a basic goal of feminism which we can all support.

Thanks for the opportunity to share my thoughts on women’s writing and my reading of books by Australian women this year. I hope AWW readers will suggest other Australian books that supplement or challenge my observations. I’d especially love to hear of more feminist or women-centered books by Australian women which are available as ebooks. I believe they would be popular here in the US.

Marilyn Dell Brady is a retired women’s History professor now living in the desert mountains of West Texas. She blogs at Me, You and Books about books, especially ones about women in all their diversity.

3 Comments

by mdbrady on November 30, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Article, Guest author

Posted by mdbrady on November 30, 2012

http://australianwomenwriters.com/2012/11/30/m-d-brady-on-when-women-write-about-women/

Jennifer Mills on classics

Used with great caution and suspicion, a literary canon, a list of significance, may have some use in guiding and informing inexperienced readers, but I think probably it’s far more useful as a target of intelligent argument and dissent.” – Ursula le Guin

All canons are lists and all lists restrictive. “Classics” are a product of their time. What a list of important books does is hammer a marker into the landscape, to be walked around, kicked at, tripped over and fought with.

The word canon, with its suggestion of religious worthiness, is a flawed term, and such a list often sees female writers under-represented. Women who write are still faced with a battle for our place in literature. It is not just critics and academics, but also publishers who decide what is a classic. Sometimes these lists are explicit, but often the “canon” referred to is not something a critic would be comfortable articulating, but an ideal, a notion of centrality and longevity. Publishers’ decisions are more concrete, but made in the context of sales and available rights.

What does it mean to be marginal? Isn’t history a constant process of reclamation of story? Given the already peripheral status of Australian fiction in a global context, this implied centre can seem absurd. I think of all the Indigenous writers now who are working to reposition literature in a post-colonial context, and the voices of migrants and the children of migrants who are claiming their place among Australian stories. If there is a centre in Australian writing it is constantly shifting. I think that’s a sign of a healthy literature.

For the AWW challenge, I decided to read five works by Australian women that I would consider classics. Not all of them would figure in every Australian canon, but each book has stood the test of time in some way. The AWW challenge therefore gave me the opportunity to reposition some women writers in my own literary list of significance, and rethink what makes a classic work.

The first was Eve Langley’s delightful book The Pea Pickers. Like Kylie Tennant’s The Battlers, The Pea Pickers is set among itinerant workers in the early 20th century. Her pickers are two young women traveling Australia dressed as men for kicks and money. They are poor and brave, fierce and vulnerable and funny. This is Australia’s Cannery Row, a collection of slapstick yarns infused with nostalgia and sorrow. As well as being hilarious, The Pea Pickers has a wonderful soul to it, capturing the drama of youth, the languid heat of the bush and the marvellous characters, some of whom will stay with me for a long time. I’m grateful to my wonderful reading community on Twitter for this recommendation.

Barbara Baynton is a writer I am ashamed to say I only heard of when someone compared my own work to hers in a review of The Rest is Weight. After looking her up I realised I had read some of her stories before in anthologies. Baynton’s name crops up now and again in lists of great Australian short story writers, but not often enough. Reading Bush Studies was an absolute pleasure. Her work is distinguished by her rural character studies and a poignancy which verges on despair, and her stories are prototypes for the proliferation of outback gothic in our literature now. Baynton is part Henry Lawson, part Eudora Welty, and a master of the tension and texture of the short story form.

Henry Handel Richardson’s Fortunes of Richard Mahony has been called the Great Australian Novel. Its classic status is least disputed among these five, and with good reason. This book was a revelation. Richardson’s insight into the minds and lives of people buffeted by changing social fortunes is both historically fascinating and intensely contemporary.

The interplay between Polly/Mary’s loyalty and Richard’s mercurial decay is ripe dramatic material, and the expatriate wanderings and constant uprooting of home lend this story an epic quality which its 900 pages only reinforce. I read it quickly, thrilled by Richardson’s capacity for tension and her ability to embed an analysis of class and colonial anxieties into the lives of her characters. Reading Ultima Thule, the last book of the three and the most modern in its intimate portrayal of the inner life, I had to bite down on a finger; the last book that did this to me was Stead’s Man Who Loved Children, and the similarities do not end there.

When I talked about this book with my mother, who is one of my great reading accomplices, she mentioned that she studied it for her Leaving Certificate in the 1960s. I can’t imagine anyone putting this on a high school syllabus now, and yet I would have loved to have had the opportunity to argue over it at that age (my 1939 edition is inscribed by a woman at teacher’s college). I’m glad I read it in my mid-thirties, with a bit of life behind me, for Mary’s battles are the battles of a mature woman. Although Fortunes was written almost a hundred years ago, it feels radical now, in a culture that tends to infantilise women.

The next book on my list is meant for the young: Miles Franklin’s coming of age classic, My Brilliant Career, a proto-feminist romance novel. I got the least out of this book among the five, perhaps because it was a re-read, and perhaps because it’s already so iconic. I found that the emotional weight of the book is very light compared to its status in our culture. But it was worth re-reading Stella Miles Franklin’s story to rediscover the sharp wit and fresh-voiced cleverness in her language – particularly impressive given that she was barely an adult herself when she wrote it. I feel an affection for Sybilla and her brave choices which I am sure many readers share.

Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower is another book to read with your thumb between your teeth. An intense study of domestic tyranny, this short novel depicts suburban Sydney with a simmering menace equal to anything in Patrick White. A bloody bluebeard tale so poisonously real I find I am still worrying about the women in it now, Harrower’s work is regaining prominence (this has been “rescued” as a Text Classic). I had not heard of her until this year, though the edition I picked up was a second-hand copy, and the impetus to read it came from Twitter (again!). I have found Harrower’s short stories amazing too and I wish that she had not stopped writing, though given the emotional intensity of her work I can hardly blame her.

These five books each have a distinct Australian flavour – the pioneering spirit we see in Richardson, Baynton and Franklin are balanced by the comedy of Langley and the tragedy of Harrower. But then, my idea of what is Australian is coloured by the whiteness of our canon and the bush narratives to which I am geographically and sentimentally attached.

These books aren’t valuable to me because they insert women into our stories. The women were always there, in Tree of Man and The Drover’s Wife and every other story worth its salt, and I can’t say the women in these books are very different from the colonial wives and good-time bush girls you will find in stories by men. We get more of a sense of the inner lives of women from women, perhaps. Or perhaps there is something that women see of life, something they witness in the Australian narrative, that a male writer would be less likely to notice.

In these books by women, the stoicism and infinite patience of colonial wives is heroic, but it is also shown to be ultimately self-destructive; the pioneer story is a story of error as much as of sacrifice; the bush girls are landscape romantics, with a humour so bleak it borders on nihilism. If, as I have long suspected, Australia’s national stories are narratives of failure and trauma, then these books by women are strong representations of our literary culture.

Reading them, I thought often of the women who had read and discussed these books before me. Knowing these readers and writers have gone before makes me feel that I am part of an active culture, a living thing. And perhaps the revisionist urge to ‘rediscover’ these women is not so much about representation, or women writing differently to men, but about belonging. Finding our place as readers and writers, tending and extending the paths that others have trodden for us, as we learn to care for a changing landscape.

Each of these books is a product of its time, but each writer also brings a universal quality to her fiction, and each has power and immediacy. That ability to speak from a certain time and place and yet speak directly to the heart of life is what makes a classic. It is something that we discover about a work over time, and only if that time is filled with reading, writing, and most importantly, robust argument.

Jennifer Mills is the author of two novels, Gone and The Diamond Anchor, and a collection of short stories, The Rest is Weight. She is the fiction editor at Overland and has read 24 books this year for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

10 Comments

by millsjenjen on November 28, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Article, Guest author review, Literary, Classic

Tagged Barbara Baynton, Bush Studies, Elizabeth Harrower, Eve Langley, Fortunes of Richard Mahony, Henry Handel Richardson, Jennifer Mills, Kylie Tennant, Stella Miles Franklin, The Battlers, The Pea Pickers, The Watch Tower, Ultima Thule

Posted by millsjenjen on November 28, 2012

http://australianwomenwriters.com/2012/11/28/jennifer-mills-on-classics/

Our beautiful meritocracy – Tara Moss on gender bias

We live in a meritocracy – a merits-based world untainted by biases and personal prejudices.

To celebrate the shift to a new website, AWW revisits the question of gender bias with Tara Moss, the author whose original stoush with literary reviewer Cameron Woodhead inspired the creation of the challenge this time last year.

Earlier this week, Moss wrote a satirical blog post sending up the opinions of those who have criticised the creation of a women’s only literary prize – and, by implication, efforts like the AWW challenge. In her post, she adopts the posture of someone who believes a “meritocracy” of literary writing exists, and that this meritocracy explains the low number of reviews in literary journals of books by women which the VIDA count has identified. Her adopted persona is baffled by damning evidence from a recent study on gender bias, a study which gives weight to the view that positive discrimination for women is still necessary. Surely such a study must be biased?

Tara has kindly given permission for AWW to post an excerpt of her article here. (It has been taken from the middle section which discusses the gender bias study; you can read the article from the beginning here.)

Moss writes:

…Those who argue that inequality still exists are ‘drama queens’ (Nicolle Flint, The Age, June 2012). Their claims are ‘playing the ‘woman’ card…hypocritical and unsubstantiated’, even downright ‘damaging to merit-based success’ (Flint again, The Age, Nov 2012). Those who bring up the issue of sexism are ‘playing the gender card ’.

Frankly, it’s privileged whining…

It should be – and further more it always is – about the best person for the job. Conscious or unconscious biases about gender, race, political leanings, religious beliefs and personal friendships and histories don’t enter into it.

Strangely, a paper was published recently in PNAS, examining the results of a randomised double-blind study where half of a group of scientists were given applications with a male name attached, and half were given the exact same application with a female name attached. ‘Results found that the “female” applicants were rated significantly lower than the “males” in competence, hireability, and whether the scientist would be willing to mentor the student.’ The scientists also offered lower starting salaries to the female-named applicants. Apparently the scientists who judged the applications were both male and female, showing – the authors of the study claimed – that a bias against women exists in both genders.

This study was obviously biased. Examining gender bias is an insult to our flawless meritocracy.

I for one wish these so-called scientists and philosophers and politicians and women’s groups would stop all their whinging about equal pay and the ‘sexist’ status quo. Organisations like The Stella Prize should wake up to all this whining they are doing and realise that they are threatening the harmony of our beautiful meritocracy with their questions about bias and their insistence on promoting the writings of women…

Read Tara Moss’s full article, “Our Beautiful Meritocracy”, here.

Tara Moss is a novelist, TV presenter and journalist. Since 1999 she has written and published eight bestselling novels – Fetish, Split, Covet, Hit, Siren, Assassin, The Blood Countess and The Spider Goddess, and been published in 18 countries in 12 languages. Her 9th novel, The Skeleton Key, publishes in December.

2 Comments

by Elizabeth Lhuede on November 20, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Article

Tagged affirmative action, gender bias, gender car, literary prizes, meritocracy, Stella Prize, Tara Moss, Vida count

Posted by Elizabeth Lhuede on November 20, 2012

http://australianwomenwriters.com/2012/11/20/our-beautiful-meritocracy-tara-moss-on-gender-bias/

Is Book Reviewing Broken?

Welcome to the draft Australian Women Writers blog site. This site will host the AWW challenge in 2013. As a test post, author Annabel Smith was kind enough to upload her discussion on the latest scandal in the online reviewing world – a piece which also appeared on the AWW Blogger site this morning. This is the second piece on reviewing by Annabel, whose book Whisky Charlie Foxtrot will be published by Fremantle Press in November 2012.

Sock puppet – image in public domain

Annabel writes:

In 2011 John Locke became the first self-published author to sell more than a million copies of his books on Amazon Kindle. He then wrote How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months, a ‘how-to’ marketing guide for other self-published authors. However, he neglected to mention one of his key marketing strategies – paying for five-star reviews.

Few people would argue that by providing a forum for ordinary readers to publicly express their opinions about what they read, the internet is having a significant impact on the world of books. But what happens when the systems that allow ordinary readers to review books are abused? Recently there has been a spate of scandals exposing reviews which flout Amazon’s guidelines stating that reviews should not be posted by users with either a financial interest or a competing book.

In a New York Times article outing the disingenuous practice of paying for reviews, it was revealed that reviewers who work for services such as Todd Rutherford’s (now defunct) GettingBookReviews.com are so poorly paid that they don’t even read the books in question and are further discouraged from being truly critical by having their fee reduced for a less than five-star review.

Perhaps even more shameful than paying for rave reviews is the practice known as ‘sock puppeting,’ in which writers create fake online identities to praise their own books and rubbish those of competitors. British crime writer RJ Ellory recently prompted outrage in the literary world when he was caught writing ecstatic five-star reviews of his own works, and low-rated pannings of his rivals’.

Some readers and writers are calling for sites like Amazon to tighten up their reviewing systems; others believe it is a case of ‘caveat emptor’, or buyer beware. Australian blogger Bernadette calls for real consequences for authors engaging in ‘morally bankrupt’ practices, in her post on Reaction to Reading titled ‘Hit ‘em where it hurts’:

…what if it wasn’t worth the risk for authors to engage in such practices? What if the cost was more than a fake apology or a few public tears? What if there were real and material consequences?

She applauds the stance of Jon Page, President of the Australian Bookseller’s Association, who has stated he will no longer stock books by authors found guilty of sock puppeting. She advocates an agreement between booksellers and bloggers not to support the works of any writer proven to have engaged in anonymously criticising their rivals’ works. Furthermore, she suggests such writers should be denied consideration for awards.

The New York Times exposé of GettingBookReviews.com quotes a data-mining expert at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who estimates that one-third of consumer reviews on the internet are fake. However, on the Guardian blog, Paul Laity suggests that due to the incredible volume of reviews on the internet ‘only a tiny fraction of them can be corrupted’. What the real figure is we may never know. But on Twitter and in the blogosphere, readers are expressing their loss of faith in the system: ‘[Reading] samples via my kindle and just being downright suspicious is my future, I guess,’ said a crime fan on Stuart Neville’s blog.)

On Twitter, @bkclb, whose mission is ‘linking independent writers and publishers to adventurous readers,’ asked ‘Is book reviewing broken? If so how do we fix it’? Certainly, readers may be more choosy about where they read their reviews in future.

5 Comments

by annabelsmith on September 18, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Article

Tagged Annabel Smith, reviewing, sock puppets

Posted by annabelsmith on September 18, 2012

http://australianwomenwriters.com/2012/09/18/is-book-reviewing-broken/

What makes a good review? Guest Post by Annabel Smith

(Imported from Blogger – some paragraph formatting problems, September 2012)

Recently, a group of volunteer bookbloggers started discussing how to build on the momentum of the AWW challenge. The result is we now have a draft website up on WordPress which we’re using to iron out a few issues that have beset this year’s challenge. (Not so sadly, Mr Linky will have to go.) The plan is to hold another challenge next year, and to allow people to subscribe to posts which related to specific genres and interest areas, covering as broad a range of Australian women’s writing as possible. The mission will be “to support and promote” writing by Australian women throughout 2013.

One issue that cropped up in our discussion is “What makes a good review?” Some bloggers have expressed concern about the quality of their reviews. Others have said they like to write “responses”, rather than critiques. One asked if AWW could do a “How to” post. As a result, author and reviewer, Annabel Smith kindly agreed to give her tips on reviewing.

Over to Annabel:

Book reviews are personal; they reflect the reviewer as well as the book being reviewed, and for that reason there is no right way to write them. However, bearing in mind that their purpose is to guide other readers in their choices, there are a few guidelines to follow if you want your reviews to be useful to others, as well as interesting to read.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that a book review is an evaluation, not a summary. Essentially, it should examine whether the author has successfully achieved what they set out to achieve. The analysis may consider the quality and significance of the book in terms of its literary merits and/or its ideas. For example:

Does the novel fit its genre or does it play with the conventions of its genre in fresh and stimulating ways?
Does it convincingly depict a certain time and place?
Were you persuaded by the narrative point of view?
Do the characters feel real and relatable?
Does it stimulate you emotionally or intellectually?
Is the plot compelling?
How does it compare to other books in its genre, or other books which tackle the same themes/issues?

Would you recommend this book to others? Your readers will be interested in your personal response to the book. For example:

How did it make you feel?
Did you relate to the characters? Why/why not?
Were the themes or issues relevant to your own life? In what ways?
Did any of your views change as a result of the ideas explored?

Whether your review is positive or negative, your opinion should be supported by evidence and a balanced review will consider both the strengths and weaknesses of a book. In a thought-provoking article entitled ‘The Ethics of the Negative Review,’ Jan Zwicky asks us to

Look at the word itself: re-view…To look again. But to what purpose? … to further “appreciation.” The reviewer who understands their task in these terms, then, would be one who has taken the trouble to listen again, to listen with care, curiosity, and respect, in an attempt to give genuine attention to what is being said. And who can help the rest of us begin to listen attentively, too. (Read more here.)

Note: Scribe has offered to give away a number of books for the best AWW reviews. Look out for details in an upcoming post.

What do you think makes a great review?

Annabel Smith’s latest novel, Whisky Charlie Foxtrot will be published by Fremantle Press on November 1st. Her first novel, A New Map of the Universe, was shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Prize for Fiction. She has had short fiction and reviews published in Westerly and Southerly, been a writer-in-residence at Katherine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre and holds a PhD in writing from Edith Cowan University. Connect with her on Twitter @annabelsmithAUS and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AnnabelSmithAUS

Australian Women Writers Challenge

All posts in category Article

The forgotten women’s writing festivals by Susan Hawthorne

Gender bias in literary reviewing: VIDA Count 2012

Sleeping Beauties: Reviving Australia’s forgotten women writers