Cirrus@Austlit

'In April this year Rosemary Dobson received a copy of her new book Rosemary Dobson: Collected. Reviewers responded to the opportunity to capture an overarching statement of Dobson's poetics and career. Literary editor of The Age Jason Steger assembled a collective portrait of Dobson and her work, compiling the words of writers and editors and weaving them with his own. Helen Garner's comments highlight Dobson's "refined or austere approach to things . . . a sense of discretion and reserve." Ivor Indyk describes "a great sense of clarity and decorum" while Chris Wallace-Crabbe admires "the steadiness of her poetry." Peter Rose who in his capacity as editor of Australian Book Review published some of Dobson's most recent poems, emphasises "a real finesse and sustained quality". (Author's introduction)

'Thea Astley had a difficult relationship with critical responses to her work throughout her entire writing life. Success - early or late career (for she had both) - did little to diminish the wounds she felt were inflicted when a reviewer or critic got to work on her "style". By the mid-1980s there were even some Australian literary scholars who were beginning to endorse Astley's own sense of critical foul play. Elizabeth Perkins wrote of Astley's fiction being the kind of writing which not only "disconcerts enthusiastic readers" but seems to render it "beyond the reach of the more usual modes of criticism" (Perkins 11; 17). Yet until now little has been said about how this state of affairs developed or how Astley, over time, came to deal with it - despite the many re - marks she made in interviews which indicate just how strange her relationship with her public persona as a writer actually was. Astley, for her part, became adept at deflection: her teenage poetry was "a form of acne" (Smith 43); she was "incapable of playing the game of the writertaking- himself-seriously seriously" (Astley, Kunapipi 21); she was just a "bit of a misfit" (Astley, Australian Voices 37) and later, more defensively, "I've worked all my life and I haven't had to time to be in the ghetto de Balmain" (Astley, Sunday Herald 3). One person who had an impact on Astley's self-regard at an early stage in her writing life was Patrick White. The record of the friendship has thus far rested on the evidence of its beginning and ending, detailed in David Marr's biography Patrick White: A life (1991) yet a letter White wrote to Astley in 1961, and which Astley kept from view and from publication in Marr's subsequent collection of White's letters, is a critical new source from which we can interpret the influence of White's mentoring of Astley.' (Author's abstract)

'World War II, and the Cold War which followed it, were years of stresses and strain for Eleanor Dark. When Lantana Lane appeared in 1959, signalling, as it turned out, the end of her literary career and seemingly light years away from her previous work, it was the culmination of two intense decades. At the beginning of 1940 she was still engaged in the long, laborious research for The Timeless Land trilogy, making daily trips to the Mitchell Library, even in the dead of winter. She was sharing the civilian experience of food shortages, wartime restrictions and rationing. Despite the popular and critical success of The Timeless Land (1941), top of The London Times' Christmas fiction list and the Book of the Month in the U.S. in October, repeatedly in letters to her publishers Dark declared herself "bothered" by her immersion in the past.' (Author's abstract)