by Bill Holloway

Tasma, long ignored by the literary establishment, was both a very good writer and, in her time, very popular. Like many of the women we discuss here, she deserves to be more widely read today.

Jessie Couvreur (1848-1897) had adopted the pen name Tasma and been supporting herself by her writing for 10 years when Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill was published in 1888 – first as a serial in the Australasian and then as a large single volume just in time for Christmas, when it was an immediate hit.

Writers of the time likened Tasma to George Eliot (1819-1880). My own impression was to note the similarities with Elizabeth Gaskell  (1810-1865), maybe because I have read her more, and more recently.

The similarities are in the frequent references to church and religion; a questioning tone, though Tasma seems more Agnostic than Dissenter; the predominance of female over male interests; and a general overall seriousness.

The novel is set in Melbourne – fictional Piper’s Hill is in South Yarra, a wealthy Melbourne inner eastern suburb; a ship approaching Melbourne; and in ‘Barnesbury’, Malmsbury, a minor gold mining town on the highway (and railway) from Melbourne to Bendigo.  The period is the 1870s when Melbourne was the richest city in the world, following the gold rushes of the 1850s, and before the land boom and recession of the 1890s. The author mentions in passing Europe preparing for war. It is likely Tasma was in Belgium with her mother during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), so maybe she is referring to this or more generally to German expansionism.

Uncle Piper, now in his sixties, had come out from England as a young man, prospered as a butcher and then as a land speculator, and built himself a mansion with extensive gardens, and a tower from which he was able to see across the intervening suburbs of St Kilda and South Melbourne to discern with his telescope ships coming down the Bay from the Heads.

Piper has a son, George, by his first marriage, and a step daughter, Laura, and much younger daughter, Louey, by his second. Laura and Louey also have an older brother, a curate in London. Louey’s mother died in childbirth but Piper promised to raise Laura as his own. Laura in young womanhood, accepts her step father’s support but not his rules and they are constantly at daggers drawn. When Piper realises George and Laura are in love he is seriously angry.

The cast is extensive and it is difficult to say if any one person is the protagonist, or even if we get to know any of the characters particularly well, though I like Laura, and it is likely she is the character Tasma has drawn to be most like herself. She and George are free thinkers. Laura is intensely loyal to George. She infuriates her step father by being beautiful, colourfully dressed, and by showing him the most studied indifference (Daughters! Who’d have them!). Laura and George also believe, theoretically anyway, in Free Love, which they discuss at length when Laura refuses to marry George on the grounds that he is not competent to support her if he is disinherited.

Piper’s sister was left behind in England where she married, above her station, Cavendish, an impoverished aristocrat. They have two daughters, the good, handsome Margaret and the thoughtless, impossibly beautiful Sara. They have lived poorly for many years on gifts to Mrs Cavendish from her brother, and at the beginning of the novel are at sea, outside the Heads, come to Australia where Piper may more easily support them. Also on the ship is a curate, the Rev Mr Lydiat, who is of course Laura’s brother, coming out to minister to the colonies after wearing himself out in the slums of London.

The Cavendishes move into their own wing of the Piper mansion and Sara and her mother fall into a life of wealth and ease. Margaret though is insistent on supporting herself, and becomes Louey’s governess; Mrs Cavendish is induced to take over the reins of an extensive household.

Sara – who has already rejected Mr Lydiat – keeps one eye on George, despite his humble birth, and another on the main chance – any young visiting aristocrat – and a return in triumph to Europe; while Mr Cavendish chafes at being supported by ‘a plebian’, talks vaguely of a government job, and researches fanciful family trees. He is clearly a type Tasma has met and doesn’t like (You may notice that she occasionally talks directly to the reader).

Mr Cavendish’s aristocratic nature was not devoid of the commonplace tendency I once heard attributed to husbands in general – [that wives are] to be petted and made much of when things are going well, and to be severely knocked about when anything goes wrong.

The plot is simple enough but what Tasma does, brilliantly and in detail, is describe the fluctuations in mood as the various young people form and reform alliances. Mr Lydiat still has hopes of Sara; George has all his hopes for rescue from debt and marriage to Laura riding on a horse he has running in the New Years Cup; Mr Piper has every intention of forcing George to marry Sara; Louey is distraught that her family is coming apart; Margaret is headed for spinsterhood while quietly pining after Mr Lydiat.

On the night before he is to take up a position in Barnesbury, Lydiat makes a fool of himself in the conservatory with Sara. Laura decides to go with him, to keep house for him and to give George space to pursue Sara. There is a day in the sun at the races …

I won’t give too much away, but Louey takes the train to Barnesbury to be with her brother and sister; there’s an accident; all the family except Sara and her father rush to Barnesbury where they are all crowded into one little cottage. There are a number of happy endings during which Tasma very much enjoys herself giving Sara her comeuppance.

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Tasma (Jessie Couvreur)
Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill
first pub. 1888. This edition: Pandora, 1987, with Introduction by Margaret Harris
277pp

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Earlier posts in this series:
The Independent Woman in Australian Literature
Bev Roberts ed., Miss D and Miss N: An Extraordinary Partnership (review)
Elizabeth Macarthur
Eleanor Dark, Timeless Land trilogy (review)
Caroline Chisholm, Married and Independent
Caroline Chisholm, Radical
Catherine Helen Spence, Woman’s Place in the Commonwealth
Catherine Helen Spence: An Autobiography (review)
Clare Wright, You daughters of freedom (review)
Janette M Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein (review)
Australian Suffragists
The New Woman in Australia
AWW Generation 1, 1788-1890