Another post in my Monday Musings subseries called Trove Treasures, in which I share stories or comments, serious or funny, that I come across during my Trove travels. 

Today’s story popped up during my research for a post on Beatrice Grimshaw for the Australian Women Writers blog. It stunned me, and I had to share it. It is, ostensibly, a review in the Sydney Morning Herald (25 July 1953) of a new-to-me Ruth Park novel, A power of roses. The review is titled, pointedly, “A power of women”, and the author, S.J.B., does not mean this as a compliment.

It opens with:

THE visitor from abroad venturing into these barbarian lands for the first time might be pardoned for concluding that women have an almost unbreakable grip on fiction in Australia.

“These barbarian lands”? And visitors need to be “pardoned” for thinking women have the upper hand in Australian fiction? Oh, the horror.

S.J.B. then says that “this domination” had “become increasingly evident” in recent months, with novels, “varying in quality from the excellent to the ordinary”, appearing in rapid succession from “Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant, Ruth Park, Dymphna Cusack, Elyne Mitchell, Dorothy Lucie Sanders, Helen Heney, Marjorie Robertson and Maysie Greig”.

He continues:

This flourishing femininity is not exactly new. For the past half century or so, our literature has been notable (if that is the right term) for its women contributors.

If “notable” is the right word to describe women’s strong role in Australian literature? He lists these “women contributors” as “Mrs. Campbell Praed, Mrs. Aeneas Gunn, G. B. Lancaster, Henry Handel Richardson, Miles Franklin, Beatrice Grimshaw, Ernestine Hill, Mary Grant Bruce, Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw, Katharine S. Prichard, Mary Mitchell, Eve Langley”. He is right, women had played a major role in Australian literature in the first half of the century, as this impressive list – representing a significant legacy – shows. Many of these writers are still read, and respected, today.

But, this long introduction to his review gets worse, because he then suggests that these writers “may go some way towards explaining why our fiction is somewhat distinguished for its garrulity, its repetitiveness, its attention to inessentials, its false humour, and its gracelessness” [my emph]. What? Who was saying all this!

However, he admits that this long list of women writers

does not explain why our male writers make such a poor showing. Can it be that Australian men are so occupied with keeping wolves from the door that only their little women [my emph] have time to write?

Perhaps breadwinning plays some role, he says, but he thinks something more is going on:

We note, for example, that in so far as Australian men are active in writing, they tend to concern themselves with social documentation – they record and interpret rather than invent.

The reason? Perhaps the fact is that Australian men lack an ability to sustain imaginative flights and the resolute patience necessary for putting a novel together. Whatever the solution, our male novelists are grievously outnumbered.

And whatever the reason, it’s interesting that it was around this time that things started to change, for the men. Patrick White’s much admired fourth novel, The tree of man, was published in 1955, and during the 1950s other “serious” male writers appeared like Martin Boyd, Randolph Stow and others.

But, back to S.J.B. … Having made these points, he finally gets to his review of A power of roses, to which he gives three small paragraphs. The novel is, he says, “in the tradition of squalor, sentiment and grotesquerie that Miss Park has made distinctively her own”, and then quotes Odysseus’ complaint about hearing the same story twice. He concludes:

Book reviewers are expected to be more tolerant. But even the most generous reviewer cannot help feeling that Miss Park’s grime, bug-infested rooms’ and poverty-stricken ratbags have lost much of their novelty as subjects for fiction. We have had it all before-and better – in The Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange.

At least he does think those two books written by a woman are good.

I have quoted heavily from the article because, while paraphrasing would have conveyed the meaning, the actual words have a “power” I had to share. As for who S.J.B. is I have not been able to ascertain. AustLit lists S.J.B. as an author of some newspaper articles, but all it can tell me is “gender unknown”. “S.J.B.” does not appear in its list of pseudonyms, which rather confirms that they don’t know who this person is, despite the fact that S.J.B. wrote several articles around this time.

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