AustLit

'This essay considers two important Australian women poets in the tradition of nineteenth-century working-class poetry, focusing on representations of gender and labour in the work of Louisa Lawson (1848-1920) and Mary Fortune (1833-1911). Fortune, who wrote fiction, journalism and poetry, is best known for her highly prolific and innovative detective writing, published in 1871 as The Detective’s Album: Recollections of an Australian Police Officer. While more poems published under her pen-names of “M. H. F.,” “W. W.,” and “Waif Wander” have recently been uncovered through the digitisation of newspapers, Fortune’s poetic output still appears to have been slighter than her writing in other genres. However, her poetry deserves attention for its place in the tradition of radical Australian working-class poetry. Louisa Lawson, whose contribution to Australian radical literature is well-known, also explored connections between labour and gender in her poetry. An analysis of her poem “They Are Taking the Old Piano” (1906) and its poetic relationship to the British poet Eliza Cook’s “The Old Arm-Chair” (1837), shows that the past and ideas of material comfort are evoked through the emphasis placed on specific physical objects relating to the “domestic sphere” within a tradition of “sentimental” poetics. Like other radical women poets, Lawson succeeds in adapting a popular sentimental mode or genre in order to highlight issues about women’s access to financial independence and the right to work.' (Publication abstract)

'Blockbuster! is a fascinating and engaging read from start to finish. The exhaustive research which informs the book never overwhelms the flow of the narrative, which is expressed in clear, precise prose. The reader is offered here two intriguing subjects. While this is the publishing story of Fergus Hume’s famous detective book, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, and an early example of the detective genre, it is also, side-by-side as it were, the story of Melbourne in the final two decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed Lucy Sussex labels three novels by Hume his “Melbourne Trilogy”: Hansom Cab (1886), Madame Midas (1888) and Miss Mephistopheles (1890), all three novels offering vibrant local colour: “a prospectus, in fiction” (200) as Sussex later puts it. The “trilogy” designation moreover lends a specific gravitas to Hume whose standing in literary terms has never had the prestige it should within the annals of Australian literature. Blockbuster! will considerably amend this situation. That Hume had published seventeen books by the end of 1892 will doubtless come as a surprise to most readers.'  (Introduction)