Cirrus@Austlit

'Blue Mountains novelist Eleanor Dark (1901–1985) is best known for The Timeless Land trilogy (1941–1953), which enjoyed such popular success in her lifetime that it overshadowed her modernist interwar fiction, including most notably Prelude to Christopher (1934). Time, Tide and History collects fifteen essays about Dark, clustered around these two highpoints of her oeuvre, but also frequently reaching out to include other, lesser-known works. The topics “arose organically out of the interests expressed by the contributors,” and yet still manage to show a wide and appropriate coverage. The editors hope to “not only . . . establish a new view of Dark’s fiction as a whole, but also to reflect on the ways in which her fiction speaks to our own present moment, in the context of a globally fraught, post-pandemic, Anthropocene era” (3). The Introduction includes a valuable survey of Dark’s career and reception. In addressing the complexity of Dark’s depiction of Aboriginal people, the editors write: “Our hope is that readers and scholars . . . will be encouraged to reflect on the never-quite-resolved dynamic in Dark’s writing between the melancholy of what her narratives picture as a lost Aboriginal past and [a] utopian dream of settler futurity” (18). (Introduction)