Cirrus@Austlit

'Katie Hansord’s Colonial Australian Women Poets: Political Voice and Feminist Tradition explores the writings of Elizabeth Hamilton Dunlop, Mary Bailey, Caroline Leakey, Emily Manning, and Louisa Lawson within networks of imperial feminist poetics. Hansord underscores the internationally networked political approaches of these women writers, who engaged with gender equity, anti-slavery movements, and other social issues, aligning them with Romantic ideals of political resistance. Context is crucial for understanding these poets’ works, which often reflected a quick response to contemporary events despite the distance from their European influences. While her chosen women wrote from the perspective of the Australian colony, Hansord reads these poets as belonging to an “imperialist” strand of feminism that did not acknowledge the perspectives of First Nations Australians. At the same time, she challenges the notion that colonial women’s poetry should be deemed entirely genteel and moralistic, arguing for a reevaluation of settler colonial women’s political engagement through their poetry.' 

(Introduction)