This week Bill (of The Australian Legend) is running an Australian Women Writers Gen 1 Week, through which he plans to highlight Australian women writers from our first generation of writers, which he defines as “those writers who came before the 1890s and the Sydney Bulletin ‘Bush Realism’ school, although many of them continued writing into the first part of the 20th century.” These women, several of whom I read before blogging, include Louisa Atkinson, Ada Cambridge, Rosa Praed, Catherine Helen Spence, and Tasma. I have written about some of these writers before, particularly Louisa Atkinson and Ada Cambridge, so today I’ve decided to highlight Bill’s week by writing on another, Tasma, whose book Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill I’ve promised to contribute to his project.
Who was Tasma?
Born Jessie Huybers in London in 1848, Tasma (as she later styled herself) came to Hobart, Australia, with her parents in 1852. Her family was apparently among the more prominent in Hobart, with their friends including successful author Louisa Meredith (1812-1895) and her husband Charles. In 1867 Tasma married the 25-year-old Charles Fraser moving to Melbourne with him. However, the marriage was troubled and Tasma returned to Hobart in 1872, leaving her debt-ridden husband behind. The following year she sailed to England with her mother and youngest siblings, and spent the next couple of years soaking up European culture with her family. Returning to Melbourne and her husband in 1875, she discovered that he’d had a child with a servant. With divorce, particularly initiated by women, rare, they remained married but lived mostly separate lives.
She started writing in 1877, taking the pseudonym Tasma to honour the colony of her youth, and in 1878 her first articles were published. In 1879 she returned to Europe with her mother and some siblings, determined to earn her living as a writer. This also marked the final break with Charles, and they were divorced in 1883.
And here I’ll quote biographer Patricia Clarke (see below):
Tasma’s life deserves to be much better known, and not only because of her now almost forgotten fame as a novelist. Just as interesting and more gender-defying, she was also an acclaimed public lecturer in Europe, and a foreign correspondent for the London Times, both roles that contradicted the perception of women as solely homebound. In her personal life also, Tasma defied all the stereotypes of the nineteenth-century woman by separating from, and divorcing, her first husband.
DPAC’s article (see below) describes her as “a celebrity lecturer” on the “geography, history, industries, culture and social progress of Australia” and says that her lectures were reported in French, Belgian and other newspapers. She met the eminent and more compatible, albeit significantly older, Auguste Couvreur in 1881, and married him in 1885, but before that, writes Clarke:
For six years before her second marriage, Tasma lived the life of a ‘New Woman’, the independent woman then beginning to appear both in real life and in fiction. From her base in Paris she earned her own living and was involved in the radical issues of the day. An interviewer wrote, ‘She was not a woman to hide the light of her militant radicalism under a bushel. When pressed to talk about her method of writing, she spoke instead of the latest developments in collectivism, and made an impassioned plea for the poor’.
Sadly, Jessie Couvreur died in 1897 of coronary heart disease, just before her 49th birthday. Way too young for someone who clearly gave a lot to her times.
What did she write?
During her life, Tasma wrote, according to the DPAC article, 7 novels, 20 short stories (several set in Tasmania) and over 36 articles on a variety of subjects. Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill, her first novel, was published in 1889, and her last, A fiery ordeal, was published, posthumously, in 1897, the year she died.
In her chapter in Debra Adelaide’s A bright and fiery troop, Margaret Harris quotes 20th century poet and novelist Winifred Birkett’s claiming Tasma as Australian
… in spite of her Dutch-French parentage, English birth, Belgian marriage, and long continental residence and professional career! She has been called by people who cannot get away from systems of category and comparison, “the Australian Jane Austen” and “the Australian George Eliot”, but without bringing her under the patent of any other writer’s name we may remember her simply as the “Tasma” of her own titling, and Australian enough by such an implication.
Interesting! Of course, I did my own bit of research in Trove and found some similar references from her 19th century contemporaries. One article in Tasmanian News (11 August 1892) reported on an interview conducted for a “Celebrity at Home” column in The World journal, writing that “Her interviewer credits her with much of the spirit of Thackeray and George Eliot, which, in combination with marked originality, is the secret of her success.” And an article from the year before in Tasmania’s Mercury (21 January 1891) writes that
The favourite Christmas book of 1888 [Uncle Piper] went through three editions before January, 1890. The success of her last two works has been equally marked, and Mr. Edmund Yates, the most competent of judges, regards her as a story writer of extraordinary power. “Uncle Piper” may very likely live as long as “Charles O’Malley,” and it is not impossible that one of “Tasma’s” literary efforts in the Chaussée de Vleugrat [sic] may yet attain the immortality of “Villette.”
Strong praise, eh! I’ve only read 20% (on my Kindle) of Uncle Piper to date, and, while the style owes more to late Victorian than to Jane Austen’s Regency/Georgian era, I can see the comparison in some of the cheekiness I’m reading. To see Eliot, Thackeray and/or Bronte, I think I’ll need to read more!
I won’t say more about her writing, except to share a comment made by Clarke regarding her descent into obscurity:
The usual explanation for her obscurity is that, like other Australian women writers who wrote about love, marriage and domestic relationships and whose main characters were women, her reputation has been overtaken and submerged by the Bulletin school of almost exclusively male writers who emerged in the 1890s. These writers glorified the traditions of mateship and the bush to establish what came to be seen as the authentic picture of Australia. Perhaps Tasma’s later obscurity was influenced by the fact that she died at a relatively young age, that for the second half of her life she lived in Europe, and that she had no direct descendants to keep her memory alive. Other nineteenth-century Australian women writers, such as Ada Cambridge and Rosa Praed, lived much longer, the former in Australia and survived by children, but this has not saved them from a similar, if perhaps less marked, obscurity.
If you’d like to know more, check out the sources below and/or watch for my post later this week …
Sources
Beilby, Raymond. ‘Couvreur, Jessie Catherine (1848–1897)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1969.
Clarke, Patricia. ‘In the steps of Rosa Praed and Tasma: Biographical details: A lecture by Harold White Fellow, Patricia Clarke‘, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1993
‘Couvreur, Jessie Catherine (1848–1897)’, Obituaries Australia, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. Also available in the original form at Trove, titled “The late ‘Tasma’ Courvreur”, The Mercury, 27 October 1897.
Harris, Margaret. ‘The writing of Tasma, the work of Jessie Couvreur’, in A bright and fiery troop (ed. by Debra Adelaide), Ringwood, Penguin Books, 1988.
‘Tasma (Jessie Couvreur nee Huybers)’, in Signifiant Tasmanian Women, Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPAC) (Tasmania). (Entry based on Patricia Clarke’s Tasma: The life of Jessie Couvreur, 1994)
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Thanks for the mention, Sue. I’ll link this MM (do you remember MM in New Idea in our mums’ day) to Tasma in my AWW Gen 1 page – and eagerly await your review. You quote Patricia Clarke, and since MST cited her last week I’m seeing her everywhere. I can only imagine I’ve been overlooking her for years – I can certainly see places where I’ve written her name. Anyway, I agree with her entirely. Australian women writers, thinkers, commentators weren’t half as “obscure” as they’ve been made out to be by the Bulletin and their followers, particularly Colin Roderick.
Thanks Bill. Yes, particularly Colin Roderick. I’ve learnt to take him with a grain of salt. As for MM, do you mean the Mere Male columns/paras. Or something else?
It just popped into my ‘brain’ that there was a much more innocent time – and much more innocent women’s magazines – when mm meant mere male.
It sure was. It was also one of the few public ways women could have a joke against men I suspect.
Oh Bill, you and your acronyms!
Haha, yes, I had to think about that one Lisa! And they say librarians and teachers are ones for acronyms! Seems like truck drivers aren’t averse either!
Victorian writing (of any heritage) is not my favourite type so I probably won’t read anything by Tasma. Nonetheless, it sounds as if she was a fascinating person.
I learn so much from your Monday musings!
Thanks Debbie. If you don’t like Victorian writing you probably wouldn’t like Tasma as she’s very wordy, but I’m enjoying Uncle Piper. Of course, I do love the Victorians.
Well I just bought it.
Uncle Piper? Great Guy. From Abe Books?
Amazon kindle
Ah, was that free or did you have to pay? I got it free from Project Gutenberg but it’s not a great format.
Fascinating blog, WG. Patricia Clarke should be congratulated for her work in bringing Tasma out of obscurity.
Thanks Sara. Yes, she should. I love what those researchers did for Aussie Women’s Lit in the 1980s.
Sue, you are the right person to know… apropos bringing women’s writing out of obscurity… in the front of my 1988 copy of Mr Hogarth’s Will, was a list of the other titles in the Penguin Australian Women’s Library series. There were not very many, and more of them were *about* women’s writing (e.g. the Debra Adelaide book) than reissues of actual titles, of which there were only two others besides Mr Hogarth’s Will. I’ve tried to find if there were others reissued in the series or whether the series died without much more happening, but I’ve had no luck so far.
Sue, forgive me for pushing my own barrow. Lisa, this post was of all the reissues I could locate.
https://theaustralianlegend.wordpress.com/2017/02/28/early-australian-women-writers/
Well, it looks from your page as if the list in my book is complete – the only one not listed is the one by Louise Mack, which makes a grand total of four by AWW plus three books *about* them. Hardly an impressive achievement for the advisory board of 8 people IMO…
When I win Tatts I’m going to commission a complete boxed set of Eve Langley. After that I guess I’d better make a start on all the missing Gen 1s
I’ll buy the first set that comes off the printing press:)
Not if I push you out of the way you won’t!
Yes, my answer, Lisa, was going to be that I didn’t think they did publish much. As Clarke says (and Bruce Beresford commented in his book), Australians aren’t good about knowing our literary tradition. When these books started coming out in the late 1980s I leapt on them, but didn’t see or get them all. UNSW did a brief series (called Colonial Texts) too. However, if people didn’t buy them, I guess the publishers gave up.
As for Langley Bill, I think I’m right in saying that Mitchell Library has many ms of unpublished books by her.
*chuckle* Maybe they needed a small army of bloggers to give them a shot of publicity!
Now that’s a good idea. Why didn’t I think of that!
You are my original authority Sue! (from your editing of Langley’s Wiki entry) but from memory Lucy Frost condensed 6 books of 400 pp ea down to one of 300 pp and 2 or 3 books of the Gippsland years remain unseen.
Haha, Bill. Yes, I had fun working on that entry. I knew some were unseen but couldn’t remember how many.
I had to do a little fix on August Couvreur last night – not major work as I didn’t have time, but I noticed that the article’s author/s had used a Tasma reference (in the reference list at the bottom) to say that “One of his interests apart from free trade was education and social progress” but did not actually mention her in the article let alone say that they were married! Amazing!
Hi Sue, I have never heard of ‘Tasma’, until today. It is good these unknown women writers are now receiving recognition, albeit a bit late! As I search for books in op shops and second hand book shops, I used to see a lot of old books – some I should have bought – but now there isn’t as many as there used to be. I hate to think they were destroyed.
Thanks Meg. I wonder how many of their books are in public libraries the way people like Dickens still are!! Not many I suspect.
Another fascinating post Sue – thanks
She sounds a fascinating character and Tasma is such a cool pseudonym! A pity that Virago didn’t publish a paperback or two to introduce her to a wider audience.
Yes, agree Ian. I don’t think Virago got onto many of our early Aussie women besides the better known ones like Henry Handel Richardson. At least not that I noticed and watched out for their books a lot in the 1980s-early 1990s.
Glad you enjoyed it Michelle. Thanks.
Thanks for this very enlightening and informative post. I had never heard of Tasma before but it does indeed seem that she deserves to be better known. Both her life and her writings sound very interesting.
Thanks Brian. It’s amazing how many writers that are out there waiting for us to re-discover. I’m really enjoying reading her, even though its style is very different to our own era’s.
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