'A beautifully written family history from Australia's best known poet. Judith Wright writes much more than a biography of her forebears in The Generations of Men. She has achieved a lyrical chronicle of an era in the life of a nation. In her elegant, subtle prose, Wright brings to life the hopes and aspirations of Australia's nineteenth-century migrants.'
-Note from 1995 edition.
'A year before her death in 2000, Judith Wright’s autobiography Half a Lifetime was published. The phrase ‘female as I was…’ peppered her stories. Miles Franklin’s Sybylla Melvyn had been a childhood idol. Wright conceded that Sybylla’s use of a stockwhip to assert power might have seemed ‘a little over the odds’. Then: ‘but if you had to?’' (Introduction)