The Silent Sea
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The Silent Sea Martin, Catherine (1848-1937) University of Sydney Library Sydney 2000 http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit/ ©Margaret R. Foxton; University of New South Wales Press; University of Sydney Library. The texts and Images are not to be used for commercial purposes without permission Source Text: Prepared from the print edition published by University of New South Wales Press Sydney 1995 Colonial Texts Series, General Editorial Committee: Harry Heseltine, Paul Eggert, Bruce Bennett Originally published in 3 volumes in 1892, London: Richard Bentley and Son. The body of the text was received in Pagemaker5 format. These files were exported to text format and encoded manually to TEI.2 conformance by C.Cole at . Front matter, appendices and editor's explanatory notes were not included in these files and this material was scanned and OCR'ed at for inclusion with the electronic text. This extra material may contain errors of transcription and these are solely the responsibility of . Any errors resulting from the manual encoding of the text are also the responsibility of . All quotation marks retained as data All unambiguous end-of-line hyphens have been removed, and the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding line. First Published: 1892 Australian Etexts novels women writers 1890-1909 prose fiction 8th August 2000 Creagh Cole Coordinator Final Checking and Parsing The Silent Sea London Richard Bentley and Son 1892 Front Images Page from Adelaide Observer advertising new publication of The Silent Sea. Page from Adelaide Observer, Saturday, April 30, 1892. Title Page 1892 Edition Volume I. Title Page 1892 Edition Volume II. General Editorial Foreword The Colonial Texts Series provides reliable texts of nineteeth century Australian literary works which have been out of print or difficult of access throughout most of the present century. The selection of titles is deliberately slanted towards works of fiction—novels and collections of short stories—because their length has militated even more than in the case of verse against their re- publication. Such texts reveal a range of colonial artistic achievement which has largely dropped from view. The significance of the titles chosen for publication derives from their power to communicate a fuller and richer understanding of Australia's colonial culture than is otherwise available: the nature of popular taste, the incidence and importance of serial fiction, the influences on Australia's colonial writers, the milieu which sustained, tolerated or rejected them. Accordingly the Introductions outline relevant biographical, historical and critical contexts which the explanatory notes, placed after the main text, further detail; and, to the extent that manuscript and archival resources permit it to be done, a composition and production history of each text is also provided. Critical editions are not mere reprints. To have taken that easier and cheaper path would have been to accept as textually reliable the actions, whether intelligent and well-meaning or not, of all persons involved in producing the commercial editions of each work; and it would have been to forgo the clarifying prospects of each editor's investigation of the circumstances of the writing, production and reading of the work in its original contexts. A reliable text represents the work accurately and fully. To this end all potentially authorial forms of the text—manuscripts, proofs, serialisations and book editions, whether Australian or foreign—have been located and compared, although some works have extant only one state with authorial involvement. The form of the work which best preserves the author's practice in formal matters, particularly spelling and punctuation, is chosen as the base or copy-text. This is usually the earliest complete or published version of the work, but if necessary the copy-text is emended to represent it (and all such emendations are listed), however, in most cases the copy-text is reproduced in essentially unemended form. Authorial alterations and revisions, if any, are recorded in the apparatus at the foot of the page. Thus a literary work as presented in the Colonial Texts Series is neither mere reprint nor eclectic synthesis; it consists of the corrected text and the apparatus, which reports its alternative authorial forms. Distinctions between authorial and non-authorial variants are made when the editor has compiled a complete bibliographical record of the textual transmission. Alterations by scribes, typesetters, publishers, and others (and variant readings first occurring in posthumous editions) will not normally be printed, but a historical collation will be lodged in the Library of the Australian Defence Force Academy. Except as specified in the Introduction or Note on the Text, the punctuation, spelling and style of the copy- text have not been regularised and so might appear at first to the modern reader as unfamiliar or inconsistent; however, they reflect authorial or at least period practice. Where a serialisation provides copy-text, care is taken to indicate the manner in which the original instalments were presented. These endeavours are aimed at presenting a reliable text for a range of colonial works and at revealing the various contexts in which each work took shape and was read, thus helping to fulfil the primary aim of the Series of making a significant contribution to the understanding of the literary culture of Australia's colonial period. Acknowledgements This edition was prepared in part with the assistance of a Faculty Research Fund Grant from the Faculty of Arts, Australian National University; I am also grateful for support provided by the English Department and the Australian Scholarly Editions Centre, Australian Defence Force Academy. Of the many people who have helped in the preparation of the edition I wish to thank, in particular, Sue Fraser, whose research assistance has been a vital contribution; Leonie Rutherford, Janet Lawrence, Sarah Lloyd, Chris MacDonald and Clare Pritchard for research at libraries in London and Australia; Dallas de Brabander, Janette Lee, Olga Howell, Joanne Pollard and Alexandra Rombouts for computer entry of text; Philippa Wicks and Nicole Lowrey for help with collating; Margaret McNally for formatting the text and preparing camera- ready copy, and Paul Ballard for cartography. I am greatly indebted to the Colonial Texts Series General Editorial Committee, and especially to Paul Eggert, for encouragement, guidance and the consideration of successive drafts. I have received valuable help from staff at the Australian National University Library; the Barr Smith Library, University of Adelaide; the Bray and Mortlock Libraries of South Australia and the Butler Library, Columbia University, New York. The National Library of Australia generously loaned its volumes of the Age for 1892-93, and the State Library of South Australia and the University of Adelaide provided photographs. Thanks are also due to a number of individuals who have contributed helpful information, and especially to, Wendy Abbott- Young, Margaret Allen, Loes Baker, R. W. Barnes, M. Bhattacharya, Helen Bridge, Alan Brissenden, Sarah Engledow, Richard Fotheringham, James Grieve, Joan Hughes, Anne Knight, Chana Lajcher, Rosie Liu, David L. Vander Meulen, Elizabeth Morrison, Ben Penny, W. S. Ramsonjulia Robinson, S. J. Routh, Janet Williams, Iain Wright, Ni Hua Ying and Elaine Zinkhan. I am indebted to the South Australian Department of Mines and Energy for providing important material on Waukaringa. I have appreciated my family's continued interest in Catherine Martin and The Silent Sea and I am particularly grateful for the participation of my husband, Hugh Campbell, in many aspects of the preparation of this edition. R.F. Introduction The Silent Sea, by South Australian novelist, poet and essayist Catherine Martin, was printed in varying forms in 1892: two versions were serialised simultaneously in Australian newspapers and a third appeared in London in traditional Victorian three-volume format and, with some editorial changes, as a onevolume paperback in New York. No manuscript or proof material of any version survives. Since its multiple first appearance, no version has been reprinted and, until now, no attempt has been made to deal with the variant texts of the work within a critical edition or to recover in detail the discursive contexts out of which the novel arose and which it addresses. Yet The Silent Sea is a powerful and unusual novel, and one which makes a very significant contribution to Australian literature. Unlike Catherine Martin's best-known work, An Australian Girl (1890), in which interest has been revived by a recent reprint,1 The Silent Sea has no European component, but remains firmly grounded in South Australia, with settings in middle-class North Adelaide, the northern pastoral district and the eastern desert country.2 It is in part a thriller of considerable psychological plausibility, set at a gold mine on the salt-bush plains which form the ‘silent sea’ of the title, and in part a triangular love story which also touches on the theme of religious faith and doubt. The title itself reflects both elements, with the parallel between the sea and the outback desert country (a recurrent analogy in Australian colonial literature) also providing a metaphor for spiritual isolation.3 The novel gives a varied and historically reliable picture of South Australia during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and its contemporaneity