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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'The paper's "core" is the "secret life" of two Australians who worked for brief periods in intelligence and transmuted aspects of their experience in stories they subsequently told. Herbert Dyce Murphy's depiction of himself as "lady spy" in Europe in the early 1900s came to influence Australia's premier novelist Patrick White in the characterisation of his homosexual protagonist in White's novel The Twyborn Affair (1979). For Dyce Murphy and White, as for W. H. Auden and others, the image of the spy held imaginative appeal as a way of projecting the necessary disguises, subterfuges and possibilities that a life of secrecy entailed.' (278)
Notes
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Includes reference to the influence of Herbert Dyce Murphy on Patrick White.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 5 Oct 2010 11:23:25
123-131
The Secret Lives of Spies and Novelists : Herbert Dyce Murphy and Patrick White