'Time, Tide and History: Essays on the Writing of Eleanor Dark is the first book-length edited collection of scholarly essays to treat the full span of Eleanor Dark’s fiction, advancing a recent revival of critical and scholarly interest in Dark’s writing.
'This volume not only establishes a new view of Dark’s fiction as a whole, but also reflects on the ways in which her fiction speaks to our present moment, in the context of a globally fraught, post-pandemic, Anthropocene era. Above all, the revisiting of Dark’s fiction is mandated by a desire to recognise the ways in which it anticipates vital debates in Australian literary and national culture today, about settler colonialism and its legacies, and with regard to the histories, condition and status of Australia’s First Nations people.
'This volume interweaves varied topical themes, from formal debates about modernism, historical realism and melodrama, to questions about modernity’s time and space, about gender and cultural difference, and about the specifics of built and natural environments. Time, Tide and History intentionally loosens the conventions of literary scholarship by including other kinds of work alongside critical and scholarly readings: a written dialogue between two contemporary historians about Dark’s legacy, and a biographical piece on the life and role of Eleanor Dark’s husband, Eric Payten Dark.
'Bringing together the interwar fiction’s feminist and modernist dimensions with the historical turn of The Timeless Land trilogy, the essays in Time, Tide and History collectively pursue ethical and political questions while teasing out the distinctive thematic, formal and aesthetic features of Dark’s fiction.' (Publication summary)
'Eleanor Dark seems for some time to have been relegated to the B-grade of Australian literary studies, though this could be an impression formed only within the changing-rooms of academe. If it is true, it must have something to do with her gender (early reviews have titles like ‘Good Novels by Women’) and with her living outside of central Sydney (Belinda McKay has an essay from the 2000s, ‘Writing from the Hinterland’, its attention to Dark’s ‘Queensland Years’ open to extension to include her Katoomba years). While Dark certainly actively engaged with other writer-critics, the later creation of her home as the Varuna ‘writer’s retreat’ indicates a remoteness from where the action is supposed to be. Politically, Dark seemed to leftists to be conservative and to conservatives she was suspected of holding communist views. The popular success of The Timeless Land shifted attention away from her literary experiments with modernist techniques, generated arguments over her mix of history and fiction, and allowed concerns about white representation of Aboriginal characters to push her work to one side. Perhaps class played a part too – an image of the comfortably-off wife of a doctor not ‘playing well’ to common Australian predilections for struggling artists wrestling with rural or worker experience. Whatever the reasons, Dark’s visibility and status as an Australian novelist has risen and fallen according to the fashions and frameworks of literary criticism and cultural politics in Australia.' (Introduction)
'Eleanor Dark seems for some time to have been relegated to the B-grade of Australian literary studies, though this could be an impression formed only within the changing-rooms of academe. If it is true, it must have something to do with her gender (early reviews have titles like ‘Good Novels by Women’) and with her living outside of central Sydney (Belinda McKay has an essay from the 2000s, ‘Writing from the Hinterland’, its attention to Dark’s ‘Queensland Years’ open to extension to include her Katoomba years). While Dark certainly actively engaged with other writer-critics, the later creation of her home as the Varuna ‘writer’s retreat’ indicates a remoteness from where the action is supposed to be. Politically, Dark seemed to leftists to be conservative and to conservatives she was suspected of holding communist views. The popular success of The Timeless Land shifted attention away from her literary experiments with modernist techniques, generated arguments over her mix of history and fiction, and allowed concerns about white representation of Aboriginal characters to push her work to one side. Perhaps class played a part too – an image of the comfortably-off wife of a doctor not ‘playing well’ to common Australian predilections for struggling artists wrestling with rural or worker experience. Whatever the reasons, Dark’s visibility and status as an Australian novelist has risen and fallen according to the fashions and frameworks of literary criticism and cultural politics in Australia.' (Introduction)
