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Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 Introduction
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

For writers, painters and performers of all stripes to talk about a sense of calling is commonplace these days. The idea that art is destiny, that the artist has no choice but to follow their vocation, has become a well-established part of popular discourse. For this very reason, perhaps, the concept of the artist's vocation is easy to dismiss. It has been invoked too often, and in too many situations where it simply does not apply. As well, its romance has been used to disguise unacknowledged privilege, depicting an individual artist's success as entirely the result of their own personal qualities and glossing over the social and cultural advantages that readied the platform for them. (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon A Free Flame : Australian Women Writers and Vocation in the Twentieth Century Ann-Marie Priest , Crawley : UWA Publishing , 2018 12178428 2018 multi chapter work biography

    ''I need to be a writer,' Ruth Park told her future husband, D'Arcy Niland, on the eve of their marriage. 'That's what I need from life.'

    'She was not the only one. At a time when women were considered incapable of being 'real' artists, a number of precocious girls in Australian cities were weighing their chances and laying their plans.

    'A Free Flame explores the lives of four such women, Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Christina Stead and Ruth Park, each of whom went on to become a notable Australian writer.

    'They were very different women from very different backgrounds, but they shared a sense of urgency around their vocation - their 'need' to be a writer - that would not let them rest.

    'Weaving biography, literary criticism and cultural history, this book looks at the ways in which these women laid siege to the artist's identity, and ultimately remade it in their own image.' (Publication summary)

         Crawley : UWA Publishing , 2018
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Last amended 19 Apr 2018 06:35:07
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