AustLit

'Across her seven novels, Amanda Lohrey has been interested in the role that reading plays in our lives. In her work, reading is always situated: we know where her characters read, how it shapes and is shaped by their circumstances. We follow 1950s Hobart communists from their reading groups to the docks to the courtroom. In a near-future Australia, characters read to find some guidance about how to act meaningfully in the face of political crisis. A woman’s reading of Jane Eyre in a dark Leichhardt terrace scaffolds her life and decisions. Another character reads Madame Bovary on a canal boat, freezing, miserable and surrounded by rowdy teenagers, and finds herself oddly reflected. A city man moves to the bush and reads travel writing about another land stolen, fought over and decimated.' (Introduction)

'When you think about something a lot it becomes hard to know whether what has become obvious to you is also obvious to everyone else. Here is one such thing: most ideas about what constitutes literary value are gendered, and they have been for a long time.'  (Introduction)

'My daughter is eight years old and has started to ignore us when she is reading. ‘Time to brush your teeth!’ No answer. ‘Can you put your PJs on?’ Nothing. ‘Just to the end of the chapter, OK?’ We give up and close the door. We don’t push her because we know what she has found: an experience that is independent of her family and school, and an absorption that belongs only to her. Soon enough she’ll have plenty such experiences, and will make her own decisions about how large a part we, her family, play in her life. Sarah Schmidt’s See What I Have Done takes an interesting stance on the question of women’s agency. It is about a woman who is, in many ways, terrible and strange, but it positions her within the context of a number of grown women who struggle to have experiences they can call their own, and for whom the family seems inescapable. This in itself is nothing new: a whole genre of contemporary fiction set in the nineteenth century deals with the straightjacket of Victorian gender norms and family structures. Nor is it new to reimagine the case of Lizzie Borden, accused of murdering her father and stepmother with an axe in Massachusetts in 1892.' (Introduction)

When Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career was published in 1901, it was acclaimed (incorrectly) as "the very first Australian novel to be published" (Stephens 2). This was the first of many impassioned responses to the novel over the succeeding hundred or so years. My Brilliant Career is a troubling and contradictory work, especially in relation to gender. It is the fictional autobiography of a teenage girl in rural Australia as she travels between her family's poverty-stricken home and the luxurious surroundings of her grand-mother's farming property, fields proposals from suitors, and tries to work out what to do with her life. Its protagonist, Sybylla Melvyn, finally rejects marriage in the hope of an independent career.' (Introduction)
 

'Ten years ago, David Marr stirred the pot with his Colin Simpson Lecture by claiming that ‘few Australian novels … address in worldly, adult ways the country and the time in which we live.’ As Sophie Cunningham among others pointed out at the time, plenty of Australian writers had, in fact, been doing this throughout the 1990s. But Marr’s speech expressed a specific view of what writing about contemporary Australia should be like. He wanted a literature of the mainstream – of ordinary life in Australia’s suburbs. The kinds of novels Cunningham and others had been publishing were about daily life in Australia, but they were about sex and poverty, unemployment and drug use. Christos Tsiolkas’ first novel, Loaded(1995), was among them. Ever since, Tsiolkas has been raising questions about what the Australian mainstream is, or might look like.' (Introduction)

'Stella Miles Franklin did not want readers of her novel My Brilliant Career to assume that its author was a woman. She wrote to its publishers, asking for the 'Miss' to be removed: she intended readers to believe it to be written by 'a bald-headed seer of the sterner sex'. When Henry Lawson first read it he was flummoxed by the gender of the author. He wrote to Franklin, asking her: 'Will you write and tell me what your really are? Man or woman?' This confusion is nowhere apparent in the preface he wrote for the novel's publication in 1901...' (Introduction, p 32)