Cirrus@Austlit

'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)