If she is known to modern readers at all, Sumner Locke is known as the namesake of her famous son, Sumner Locke Elliott, or perhaps as one of the fictionalised versions Elliott created of his absent mother: Sinden Marriott in Careful, He Might Hear You or Sidney Lord in Waiting for Childhood.
And yet Locke was a prolific and popular writer in her own right.
Born in 1881 in Sandgate, Queensland, Helena Sumner Locke was raised in Melbourne. From the late 1890s, she pursued–seemingly successfully–a career as an elocutionist, but was always more interesting in writing for the stage than in appearing on it. Her first play, The Vicissitudes of Vivienne was staged (by a cast of amateurs) in 1908, and a number of contemporary newspapers would later refer to her as Australia's first female dramatist.
By this point, Locke was also selling short stories, the first of which appeared in 1907, to magazines and newspapers. Her stories fell broadly into two categories: slick, fashionable, ironic romances and broadly humorous tales of selection life. Her first novel, Mum Dawson, 'Boss' (1911), fell into the latter category, and cemented her reputation as an author with a keen ear for the idioms of Australian country life.
But her contemporary romances still made up the bulk of her output.
When World War I broke out, Locke's stories changed sharply.
She still wrote bright, fashionable romances and stories of selection life–but from November 1914, they were war stories and they were, more often than not, about women: wives coercing their husbands to enlist, wives convincing their husbands not to enlist, mothers struggling with the enlistments of their sons, women keeping rural communities running in the absence of men, sweethearts convincing their wounded lovers to marry them even in the absence of limbs or sight.
In all of them, Locke's ironic tone shines through.
In 'Three Gentlemen to the Front' (July 1915), for example, the men seeking a weekend's sport find themselves in a world of women, as all the local men have enlisted. Everything that was once performed by men is performed by women–even the 'tramp' who throws one of the men entirely out of the ring during an ad hoc wrestling match:
"I knew," he kept saying, all the time Milton was holding a cold bandage to his head. "I knew it was a woman all the time, and that's why I had to let her get me—oh, Dash, get me some brandy will you? I knew it was a woman from the start."
And in 'The Eternal Softness', elderly spinster Miss Lucy bewails the uselessness of women in wartime:
Miss Lucy swung a heavy hammer, and brought it down with a resounding crash on the head of the nail sticking out of the packing-case she was working upon. The nail sank fully an inch and a half into the wood, and the elderly spinster turned to me as I sat there, wondering.
"I often think," she said, "that it is a pity women are so useless in the world at such a time as this. That we have to pander to the eternal softness in us."
Spinsters, wrestlers, mothers, wives: Locke wrote a world of war-torn women against the backdrop of an ongoing conflict.
Each of the tiles below represents the AustLit record for one of Sumner Locke's war romances. Click on a tile to expand it, and see both a brief synopsis of the story and a link to its AustLit record.
To read each of these stories in full, follow the link to their AustLit record.
Sumner Locke's own war romance did not have a happy ending.
On 20 January 1917, she married Paymaster-Sergeant H.L. (Henry Logan) Elliott, a childhood friend. His local newspaper notes that
The bridegroom was once of Ballan's popular residents, and took an active part in the local dramatic club and rifle club–being one of its crack shots ... Before enlisting 8 months ago he occupied the position of head clerk at the Lithgow Small Arms factory. (Gordon, Egerton and Ballan Advertiser, 16 February 1917, p.4).
Logan sailed for the front on 6 February 1917, by which point Locke was already pregnant.
Locke continued writing and publishing throughout 1917, and in the middle of the year, undertook a professional trip to the United States, where her novel Samaritan Mary (set in the US) had been successful. (An interview she undertook with the Auckland Star en route to the US is available via Papers Past.)
Locke hoped that she might be able to be reunited with her husband at the end of her tour of the US but, the Atlantic being closed to civilian traffic, she returned home instead.
Locke gave birth to her son, Sumner Locke Elliott, on 17 October 1917.
She died in a Sydney nursing home of eclampsia on 18 October 1917, having never seen her husband again.
Below are the enlistment papers for H.L. Elliott, Sumner Locke's husband. Note that he has originally answered 'No' to the question of whether he is married, but this has been amended to 'Yes' in lead pencil.
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