AustLit

'Lesbia Harford (1891–1927) has occupied only a small place in Australian literary history – for decades, she was utterly forgotten – yet when she died, at thirty-six, she left behind three notebooks containing some of the finest lyric poems ever written in Australia.

Harford’s writing looks both forwards and backwards, blending Pre-Raphaelite influences and plain-speaking with unusual subtlety. At the same time, Harford was bound inextricably to the period in which she lived: war in Europe, changing attitudes to religion, the suffrage movement, and widespread social upheaval all helped make her one of the first truly modern, urban figures in Australian poetry.' (Publisher's blurb)

It's 1915 and the world is at war - a fact of no great significance to the quiet world of Sally Putman with its chooks to be fed, ice-creams to be sold to ferry passengers bound for the beach at Mosman, its gramophone parties and next door neighbours. But being German in an Australia gripped by prejudice is a fact that must be dealt with.

Considered too radical perhaps for publication in its own time, The Invaluable Mystery has only now, more than sixty years after its writing, been unearthed in the National Archive.

(Source: back cover, 1987 edition)