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Australian Girls' Family Stories, 1894-1982 Kerry M

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Australian Girls' Family Stories, 1894-1982 Kerry M University of Wollongong Research Online University of Wollongong Thesis Collection University of Wollongong Thesis Collections 1985 Founded on compromise: Australian girls' family stories, 1894-1982 Kerry M. White University of Wollongong Recommended Citation White, Kerry M., Founded on compromise: Australian girls' family stories, 1894-1982, Doctor of Philosophy thesis, Department of English Literature and Drama, University of Wollongong, 1985. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/1378 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact Manager Repository Services: [email protected]. FOUNDED ON COMPROMISE - AUSTRALIAN GIRLS' FAMILY STORIES 1894 - 1982 A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY from THE UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG by KERRY M. WHITE B.A.(Hons.) Department of English Literature and Drama 1985 CONTENTS Acknowledgements iv Abstract vii INTRODUCTION 1 PART ONE: The Turner Era 1 Looking Back I Modest Subversion - the 11 Foundations of Family Stories II Critical Evaluation of 28 Australian Girls' Books 2 A New Departure - Ethel Turner and 50 "Seven Little Australians" 3 Fame and Money - Ethel Turner's Later Novels 80 4 Enter the Australian Schoolgirl - Louise 109 Mack's "Teens" novels 5 "You're only a girl" - Lilian Turner's Novels 143 6 "They've none of 'em grown up I" - Mary Grant 171 Bruce's "Billabong" novels PART TWO: The Moderns 7 Chips of Old Pots - the Bridging Years 199 1930 to 1950 8 Laurel Trees and Ugly Ducklings. - the New 226 Heroine in Novels by Eleanor Spence, Joan Phipson, and Mavis Thorpe Clark 9 Seeking and Finding? Contemporary Rebels in 258 the Novels of Eleanor Spence, Mavis Thorpe Clark, and Hesba Brinsmead 10 Links with the Past and New Directions - the 284 Later novels of Eleanor Spence and Joan Phipson CONCLUSION 312 Notes 319 Bibliography 344 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have many people to thank for giving me help and support during the writing of this thesis. Firstly I acknowledge the financial aid of a University of Wollongong post-graduate scholarship. To be a student at this University is a privilege, to be paid to remain is paradise! Grateful thanks to the University gardeners who are creating a green environment that is in itself an inspiration. I am indebted to Mr Jonathon Bruce for allowing me to use the Bruce Papers; to Nancy Phelan for information about her aunt Louise Mack; and special thanks to Eleanor Spence, Patricia Wrightson, Lilith Norman, Kath Hawke and Noreen Shelley for answering several queries promptly and with generosity. I am grateful to the staff of the University of Wollongong library for help over the years, and will always recall with pleasure time spent working at the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales; the La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria; and at the Lu Rees Archives, Canberra College of Advanced Education. Regarding the last, thank you to Dr Belle Alderman for first drawing my attention to this collection, to Elizabeth Bray the Archives librarian, and to Diana Page for hospitality in chilly Canberra. The writing of this thesis has depended on the technology of the micro-processor. Thanks go to the School of Industrial and Administrative Studies; particularly to the Head of School, Dr Michael Hough, the School secretary Deborah Turner, Dr Bruce Lo, and the staff of the Micro-computer Laboratories. All have helped direct the faltering steps of a potential computer fan. I have been fortunate to have the companionship of both fellow post-graduates and the staff of the Department of English Literature and Drama. Everyone has helped in some way to make the writing of this thesis a happy task. Thanks to Deidre Coleman, Kim Draisma, David Vance and Dr James Wieland for proof­ reading the thesis and for their valuable comments. I thank Departmental secretary Audrey Allen for her unstinting kindness. My supervisor Dorothy Jones has helped me in many ways. I thank her for her good humour and optimism - no one could have had a better teacher, and this thesis might never have been completed without her guidance. This thesis would never have been started without the child-care provided by my mother Margaret White, Kid's Uni, and by my mother-in-law Margaret Tosswill. Outstanding amongst caring people has been my husband vi Bruce Tosswill, whose valiant attempt to understand the cataloguing system at the La Trobe library was only one of many unselfish acts. In spite of thesis blues, his love and support did not falter. I owe quite a different debt to my young son Robert whose joyful exploration of a new world has made me appreciate the value of a spare minute. Lastly I dedicate this thesis to the memory of my late grandfather, Wildred Evans. He might have felt this to be an odd thing to absorb so much of one's time, nevertheless I know he would have been very, very proud of my efforts. ABSTRACT On 21st September, 1894, Ethel Turner received her first bound copy of Seven Little Australians, "I think it was the very happiest minute of my life" she wrote in her diary. This first novel by a young author went on to become a famous and.important work of Australian literature. On its publication, Ethel Turner became a national figure and Seven Little Australians, although meant for children, was read by everybody - from the Governor of New South Wales and the author Mark Twain - to girls and boys who later, as adults, wrote of the novel's impact on their perception of Australia. Seven Little Australians marks the beginning of the family story in Australia, and provides a focus for my study of the genre. Variously known as domestic fiction, or by the blanket term "girls' literature", family stories originated in England in the 1850's as fiction meant specifically for girls. It is this continuing anticipation by writers and publishers of a mostly feminine readership that shapes my examination of Australian family stories from 1894 to 1982. This thesis aims to construct an historical framework for the Australian family story and, from this, to trace interconnections between novels written over a span of almost one hundred years. The thesis is divided into two major sections; the "Turner era" 1894 to 1942, and the "moderns" 1943 to 1982. In Chapter One, I look back to the origin of the girls' family story in England and America, and examine the major features of the genre. In the second half of this Chapter, I look briefly at Australian children's fiction published prior to 1894 and conclude with a survey of contemporary critical responses to Australian girls' fiction. As the dominant genre in Australian children's fiction, many authors have written family stories. In this thesis I closely examine only eight authors who, as distinguished writers, have in some way influenced the nature of the family story in Australia. In Chapters Two to Six, the principal writers of the Turner era: Ethel Turner, Louise Mack, Lilian Turner and Mary Grant Bruce, are considered against a background of a developing national consciousness and the growth of a national literature. Overseas paradigms outlined in Chapter One, are compared to Australian literary portraits of girls, to distinguish the Australian family story from foreign forebears, but also to understand how our writers viewed the prospects for girls and women in a new society. Chapter Seven is a bridge between the two major historical periods, examining the years that saw the decline in popularity of the Turner era writers, and the rise of a group of writers who gave new impetus to the genre. In Chapter Eight, novels by Eleanor Spence, Joan Phipson, and Mavis Thorpe Clark are considered as evidence of changes in the pattern of the Australian family story that distinguishes the Turner era from the modern period. In Chapter Nine, I look at modern attempts to use an older style of heroine in novels by Spence, Clark and Hesba Brinsmead. Chapter Ten links the patterns of Phipson's and Spence's long careers as children's writers to the critical reception of children's fiction, as well as emphasising these two authors' continuing preoccupations and their effect on the nature of the family story. Throughout the thesis I test my contention that the predominant pattern of family stories emanates from an author's desire to confront and question the changes expected from girls as they pass from adolescence to womanhood - a desire that lends complexity to a genre of children's fiction that has been sometimes undervalued because it is often misunderstood. INTRODUCTION Women's fiction reflects an experience radically different from men's because our drive towards growth as persons is thwarted by our society's prescriptions concerning gender. Whether women authors are conscious of this feminism or force profemina in their novels or not, or whether they are overtly concerned with being and writing about women, the tension between what Apollo intends and Daphne is willing to accept, between forces demanding our submissions and our rebellious assertions of personhood, characterize far too much of our fiction to be incidental.! ...fiction can articulate not just what is imposed as a social and intellectual system, but the lived experience of it and the conflicts within it; it includes the frustrations and distortions, the failures and aspirations. Thus a novel can at once resonate with the values of liberal ideology and patriarchal culture and be simultaneously critical of them.2 2 In this study of Australian girls' family stories, the novels of Ethel Turner represent both a focus and a beginning. When the first Australian children's book to feature a girl heroine, Seven Little Australians, was published in 1894 it formed another link in a lengthy tradition of domestic fiction that had become well established during the nineteenth century in England and North America.
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