'Emily Bethal is dying. The doctors give her two years at best. It will be two years of increasing pain and dependence. It is probably the dependence that Emily fears the most. She is independent, spirited and wilful. She has strong opinions and she knows the way the world works ... but she also knows how it should work. Is the deal worth it? Yes, she will avoid the two years of suffering and has traded it for for one week of living in the future. And the future she will see? The bright shiny wonderful and miraculous world of 1988. Yes 100 years into her own future takes her back to our recent past. See the wonders that Emily sees as she experiences a world that she just knows must exist for the betterment of all man ... and womankind.'
Source: 2010 Chimaera edition
'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)
