AustLit

'Over his prolific artistic and authorial career Norman Lindsay published eleven novels for adults. Spanning more than fifty years from the publication of A Curate in Bohemia in 1913 to Rooms and Houses in 1968, the focus of Lindsay's writing was usually small sets of characters in country towns or city rooming houses. The production of heteronormative, binary gender was a focus of Lindsay's work, and his use of the male/female, masculine/feminine binary is present, and explicitly delineated, throughout all his fiction. Of these eleven novels only two have female protagonists; The Cousin from Fiji (1945) and Dust or Polish? (1950). Lindsay's narrative attempts to explore the feminine within these two texts do demonstrate, however, the continued influence of the masculine author and reader through a triangulation of the controlling male gaze.' (Introduction)