AustLit

'Ranging from feminist movements, Labour Movement to celebration of Australian natural world, Mary Gilmore has been a legend. Gilmore’s complex yet “eternal” love for the legendary Australian national poet, Henry Lawson, and their extraordinary intellectual literary partnership has remained in oblivion. Gilmore’s biographers have often doubted that Lawson’s literary fame is the result of Gilmore’s silent sacrifice of her literary space because of her blind love for Lawson. Based on Gilmore’s extensive collection of verse, prose, biographies and unpublished letters, this chapter explores the feminist space of relationship between two talented and self-reliant Australian women writers, Dame Mary Gilmore and Henry Lawson’s mother, Louisa Lawson and their literary life in relation to Henry Lawson.'

Source: Abstract.

'This volume explores the subterfuges, strategies, and choices that Australian women writers have navigated in order to challenge patriarchal stereotypes and assert themselves as writers of substance. Contextualized within the pioneering efforts of white, Aboriginal, and immigrant Australian women in initiating an alternative literary tradition, the text captures a wide range of multiracial Australian women authors’ insightful reflections on crucial issues such as war and silent mourning, emergence of a Australian national heroine, racial purity and Aboriginal motherhood, communism and activism, feminist rivalry, sexual transgressions, autobiography and art of letter writing, city space and female subjectivity, lesbianism, gender implications of spatial categories, placement and displacement, dwelling and travel, location and dislocation and female body politics. Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing tracks Australian women authors’ varied journeys across cultural, political and racial borders in the canter of contemporary political discourse.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.