Cirrus@Austlit

'Among the cluster of Australian women writers working in the early to mid-twentieth century and engaged with the debates and experiments of literary modernism, Eleanor Dark has always held a place of prominence. While her work has always attracted scholarly attention—even when it was accused of popularism—scholarly book-length studies of Dark are few and far between, limited to primarily biographical works like Eleanor Dark: A Writer’s Life (Barbara Brooks and Judith Clark, 1998), although a new collection on her work, edited by Brigid Rooney and Fiona Morrison, is scheduled for imminent publication by Sydney University Press. Melinda J. Cooper’s Middlebrow Modernism: Eleanor Dark’s Interwar Fiction therefore marks a welcome and long overdue focus on one of Australia’s most important writers of the twentieth century. The book can be seen as part of a growing movement of new scholarship on Australian women writers working around the wartime period, including Meg Brayshaw’s Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism (2022), and Brigitta Olubas’s Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life (2022).' (Introduction)