By Theresa Smith
A post in our 2026 series featuring works published in 1946 (or by authors who died in 1946).
In her book, Inconvenient Women: Australian Radical Writers 1900-1970, Jacqueline Kent explores the female writers who were shaping the literary and cultural landscape of the twentieth century against a backdrop of significant societal change. The book is broken up into sections and given that we are focussing on 1946 this year here at AWW, I thought I’d share her reflections on the women who were writing during the decade of the 1940s.
The women who were writing in Australia in the 1940s were doing so on the back of economic depression, amid a second world war, and coming out of that, under the fearful shadows of communism and the policing and suppression of writing and speech within the context of communist leanings. It really is a fascinating and fraught time to have been a writer, be it a journalist, playwright, screenwriter, poet, novelist, or a writer of nonfiction – all of which are included by Kent in her book.
In the words of Katharine Susannah Prichard, in a letter to Miles Franklin in 1941:
‘The nervous tension of these days is so exhausting, so many friends in trouble, and it seems almost impossible to dissociate oneself from the grief and suffering, the woe of the world, the salvaging of humanity. I stand where I always did, of course, but is “the pen mightier than the sword”? If only it were so.’ (p.154)
As an aside, I did really love the interconnectedness of the writing community that was evidenced throughout this book. Much like today, except without social media and through actual letters. Many of the writers in this 1940s section were familiar to me, I have quite a collection of books on my shelves by them. As mentioned above, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Miles Franklin, along with Eleanor Dark, Dymphna Cusack and Florence James, Kylie Tennant, Dorothy Hewett, Majorie Barnard, Ruth Park, and Flora Eldershaw; also, journalists Alice Jackson, Adele ‘Tilly’ Shelton-Smith, and Lorraine Stumm – women who were at the forefront of the Australian writing scene throughout the decade, as well as the preceding ones and beyond. I liked the inclusion of journalists within this book, as they were women who were writing lengthy human-interest pieces that were often overlooked by their male counterparts as ‘soft news’, yet contributed substantially to the cultural landscape of the country.
These women often moved within each other’s orbit, some were friends, some were not, some supported each other’s work, and others were openly hostile to the writings of some – Ruth Park, as an example, a young woman from New Zealand who had married an Australian, copped quite a bit of flack for The Harp in the South, particularly after she won a major literary prize with it, which included prize money and a serialising of the novel in the Sydney Morning Herald. I felt quite sorry for her with the way she was treated by older, more seasoned women writers. But such is the way of human nature and women were not published as readily as their male counterparts; one can deduce what they like from that sort of competitive vacuum.
One thing the writers of this era had in common was their passion for preserving the cultural and literary landscape of Australia. Their political beliefs may have differed, their socioeconomic situations, education levels, and qualifications certainly did, but they were all aligned on the importance of their words not being suppressed because of political agendas. Kent’s book showcases the vibrant and vast group of women writers across the first seventy years of the twentieth century. They were not few, and their voices were instrumental in shaping literature and media. This book is a valuable exploration of their legacies.
Sources:
Kent, Jacqueline (2025) Inconvenient Women: Australian Radical Writers 1900-1970, NewSouth Publishing, University of New South Wales Press.
Theresa Smith is the former historical fiction editor and team coordinator of the Australian Women Writers Challenge. She is a current contributor to the AWW Early Years project. Her main reading interests are classics, translations, literary and historical fiction, with a particular focus on elevating women’s voices in literature.
Instagram @tesssmithwrites
Thanks for highlighting this book and these writers, Theresa. I recognise most of them, but there are a couple I didn’t know. I agree that it is good that she included the journalists and newspaper column writers.
Finally, “but is “the pen mightier than the sword”? If only it were so.’ ” The ongoing cry!
It really is a terrific book, not to mention a cover made for AWW if I’ve ever seen one! I particularly enjoyed to extracts of letters between the various women writers, but social history has always been my particular interest.
That was a mighty cohort of women writers who began, mostly, in the early thirties. I’m sorry they lost touch with Christina Stead, though I think they observed her progress – and welcomed her when, much later, she returned (as it happens, I’m in a read-along with a couple of friends of Stead’s 1946 novel, Letty Fox).
Eve Langley records in her journals – see Lucy Frost – that Ruth Park, then still a journalist in NZ, helped her when she was down and very nearly out before the publication of The Pea Pickers. Park doesn’t mention interacting with other writers, apart from her husband!, in The Drums Go Bang. I knew there was adverse reaction to Park documenting Sydney’s slums, but I’d be sorry if it came from other writers.
It’s a fascinating read, you may enjoy it. They were indeed a mighty cohort. There was certainly some adverse reactions to Ruth and her book, the prize and serialisation of it. She seemed to cop it on two levels: from writing about the slums and from what was deemed as a usurping of her fellow female writers, who had been at it for longer. It was fascinating to read some of the extracts of correspondence between writers, not only on Ruth but on all sorts of topics. They were a real highlight.
Of course, my review has narrowed in on the chapters covering the 1940s only, the book has so much more to offer across coverage of 70 years and indeed covered so many more writers.
Because it’s still fresh in my memory from reading Hazel Rowley’s bio about Stead, I can confirm that Florence James and Stead were very good friends for quite some time in their early years together in London, but the friendship started to sour after James and Cusack’s success with Come in Spinner. Then Stead based ‘Miss Herbert’ on Florence and that was that.
When she came back to Australia, Patrick White and Elizabeth Harrower befriended her, but White had also stopped seeing her by the end.
Thanks Brona, sorry about the delayed reply. I have always had a little interest in Florence James, but have never followed it up, so this is interesting.
BTW, Why did their friendship sour after that success?
Thanks for introducing this book, Theresa. It sounds fascinating – and perfect for AWW, as you say. It’s a shame about those rivalries. Is there any suggestion that class was involved? I’m wondering if the rural working class was somehow seen as more acceptable as subject matter for fiction than the urban working class?
It seemed more about her youth and instant success than anything else. As though she hadn’t put in the hard yards, so to speak. And while her writing about the slums was criticised, this seemed separate to the criticism levelled at her personally within correspondence between other women.