'Paradoxically, Australian nationalist accounts have tended to slight the earliest Australian literature by white settlers from the nineteenth century. This chapter surveys the literary history of this period, examining writers such as Oliné Keese, Ada Cambridge, Henry Kingsley, Rosa Praed, and Catherine Helen Spence. Drawing connections between these writers and the transnational Anglophone literary world centering on Great Britain and the United States, this chapter takes a comparative perspective that at once acknowledges the peripheral standing of these Australian texts and argues for their relevance to the history of the novel in English.' (Publication abstract)
'Stella Miles Franklin did not want readers of her novel My Brilliant Career to assume that its author was a woman. She wrote to its publishers, asking for the 'Miss' to be removed: she intended readers to believe it to be written by 'a bald-headed seer of the sterner sex'. When Henry Lawson first read it he was flummoxed by the gender of the author. He wrote to Franklin, asking her: 'Will you write and tell me what your really are? Man or woman?' This confusion is nowhere apparent in the preface he wrote for the novel's publication in 1901...' (Introduction, p 32)
That Shining Band : A Study of Australian Colonial Verse Tradition
St Lucia
:
University of Queensland Press
,
1994
Z463297
1994
single work
criticism
Rejecting the apparently common perception that Australia's national identity was first expressed in verse by the balladists of the 1890s, Ackland explores the thematic developments of early colonial poets, both men and women, whose place in Australia's literary history he believes to have been largely undervalued.
'Stella Miles Franklin did not want readers of her novel My Brilliant Career to assume that its author was a woman. She wrote to its publishers, asking for the 'Miss' to be removed: she intended readers to believe it to be written by 'a bald-headed seer of the sterner sex'. When Henry Lawson first read it he was flummoxed by the gender of the author. He wrote to Franklin, asking her: 'Will you write and tell me what your really are? Man or woman?' This confusion is nowhere apparent in the preface he wrote for the novel's publication in 1901...' (Introduction, p 32)
