Women writers

Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (#BookReview)

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My reading group has a tradition of choosing a “big” book for our January read. We also like to do a classic each year. This year the two coincided when we chose Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton, as our 2026 starting book. I have read several Gaskell novels and stories – plus Nell Stevens’ bio-memoir, Mrs Gaskell and me: Two women, two love stories, two centuries apart (my review) – but her first novel has been a gap, so when one of our members suggested Gaskell, I proposed Mary Barton. And phew, it generated a great discussion!

Most of you will know Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), I’m sure, but I’ll briefly introduce her here. She is a significant English novelist, who is best known for her “social problem” novels, Mary Barton (1848) and North and south (1854-5), and for her more comic novel, Cranford (1864-6). Lesser known is her biography of her friend, The life of Charlotte Bronte, which was controversial, and is covered by Stevens in her book. Relevant to this post is that Gaskell married a Unitarian Minister, and lived in Manchester where she worked with the poor.

So, Mary Barton … Admired, apparently, by Charles Dickens, it is set in Manchester around 1840, a time when the cotton trade was facing a serious downturn, with all the flow-on economic ramifications in a newly industrialising society. It focuses on two working-class families, the Bartons and the Wilsons, and on John Barton’s questioning the distribution of wealth and the master-worker relationship. Early in the novel, Barton’s wife dies, leaving him to raise his daughter Mary. Increasingly concerned about the deteriorating economic conditions facing himself and his co-workers, John becomes involved in Chartism and the Trade Union Movement. Meanwhile, Mary tries to make her own way in the world, as a seamstress. Although she has been loved by Jem Wilson since childhood, she is initially attracted to and pursued relentlessly by Harry Carson, the son of a wealthy mill-owner. When Harry is murdered, the plot thickens and in the novel’s second half the personal and socioeconomic issues come to a head.

Now, the common challenge – how to write about a classic? What can we add to discussions about books that have been extensively analysed by academics and students? Sure, Mary Barton is less studied than the Austens and Dickens, the Whites and Steinbecks, but still …

I could focus on my reading group’s discussion, and I will do some of that, but during our discussions I cannot, of course, explore my own thoughts at depth – or even raise them all – so these together with a couple from our discussion will be my focus.

And I’ll start with form. Mary Barton is a mid-nineteenth century novel, and like novels of that time, it is big and baggy. It was Henry James, who, semi-critically, described some 19th-century novels as “large, loose, baggy monsters”. His specific comment was “what do such large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?” If I understand correctly, he was referring to big story canvases that lacked “composition” or “form”. This is what I was thinking as I was reading Mary Barton. I jotted down that it felt messy and confused between forms – a social problem novel, a romance or sentimental novel, a melodrama, a morality tale, crime fiction, an adventure story – but this was a time when the novel was still relatively new and finding its way.

As for my reading group, most found it slow to start, and very wordy, with several wanting Gaskell to just “get on with it”. However, the second half, when the pace picks up, grabbed everyone’s attention, resulting in most of us greatly appreciating it.

“the grinding, squalid misery”

Certainly, I forgave the book its “messiness”, because it tells a powerful story about inequality and precarity (discussed in this week’s Monday Musings). Gaskell offers a real and moving insight into the society of the time, and into some of the thinking that was happening. She writes with the compassion that came – at least in part – from her dissenting Unitarian background, and she shocked many of her peers with her realistic portrayals of the grimy sides of life. She had strong moral views but was humanitarian in her application of them. Some in my group felt she was a little tough on the women – particularly John’s straying sister-in-law Esther – but I (and others) disagreed, believing Gaskell was prepared to offer redemption to the fallen woman.

This is not to say, however, that Gaskell didn’t bother me at times. An aspect of this novel is its high level of authorial intrusion. Mostly it conveys information that her characters cannot know – or perhaps that she could not find a way for them to impart – about the wider socioeconomic background. But, at times it is attended by what comes across to a modern reader as a patronising tone. Early in the novel, for example, she – the author-narrator – discusses John Barton who has just lost his wife and who sees only himself, and his kind, as sufferers. She writes:

I know that this is not really the case; and I know what is the truth in such matters: but what I wish to impress is what the workman feels and thinks. True that with child-like improvidence, good times will often dissipate his grumbling, and make him forget all prudence and foresight. (p. 24)

She goes on to explain that while “earnest men” like John Barton had seen suffering, he was a good worker, who felt “pretty certain of steady employment”, and so

… he spent all he got with the confidence (you may also call it improvidence) of one who was willing, and believed himself able, to supply all his wants by his own exertions. (p. 24)

However, when his employer fails, and the other mills start failing, he has nothing to fall back on and “his life hung on a gossamer thread”. Gaskell’s obvious compassion is tempered by a middle-class value judgement regarding being “provident”, which reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of what we recognise as “precarity” wrought by capitalism and industrialisation.

the “human condition”

The novel ends with a serious discussion between John Carson’s friend, Job Legh, and mill-owner, Mr Carson, with Job trying to explain to Carson, “the effect produced on John Barton by the great and mocking contrasts” he saw in the “human condition” around him. Eventually, after an open-minded conversation, Mr Carson comes to understand at least something of the other side and attempts to improve how the masters do business.

It is regarding this resolution that one of my reading group members made the point that Gaskell does not offer a radical solution to the problem. Gaskell suggests that people understand each other better – “that the truth might be recognised that the interests of one were the interests of all, and, as such, required the consideration and deliberation of all” – rather than proposing a different economic or political system altogether.

I would add, though, that Gaskell did also believe in some practical reforms, one being in education. She frequently mentions John Barton’s lack of education affecting his ability to think through the issues that concerned him. Indeed, near that end, John admits that he had struggled to find “the right way”, because

“No one learned me, and no one telled me … they taught me to read, and then they never gave no books …” (p. 445)

In other words, he knows that education is more than just learning to read. Job tells Mr Carson, “it was most desirable to have educated workers, capable of judging [my emph], not mere machines of ignorant men” (p. 467).

So much more could be explored in this big book, but I’ll end here by saying that while its dramatic plot and well-delineated, rounded characters make Mary Barton enjoyable reading, it is Gaskell’s depiction of ongoing economic realities that makes it well worth reading.

Elizabeth Gaskell
Mary Barton
London: Penguin English Library, 2012 (Orig. pub. 1848, in 2 volumes)
497pp.
ISBN: 9780141974675 (Kindle edition.)

Emma E. Butler, Polly’s hack ride (#Review)

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Emma E. Butler’s short story “The scapegoat” is the fifth in the anthology Great short stories by African-American writers, which my American friend Carolyn sent me. Unlike the previous author, Paul Laurence Dunbar, is barely known.

Emma E. Butler

The biographical note at the end of the anthology comprises three sentences! The first two read:

This was Emma E Butler’s sole story for The Crisis. No details of her life have been published.

The third offers a one-line summary of the story.

Of course, I did my own search, but if the editors of this anthology couldn’t find anything meaningful about Butler I wasn’t hoping for much. My first search resulted in AI summarising that “Based on the search results, there appears to be a distinction between Emma Butler, an Australian author, and the renowned African American science fiction author, Octavia E. Butler”. Given my search was for “Emma E Butler African American author”, the results list focused on links for Octavia E. Butler. Hmm, it wasn’t looking good.

I then searched on “Emma E Butler Polly’s hack ride”, and got several results, including links to a digital copy of the journal containing the story. I discovered that The Crisis was subtitled “A Record of the Darker Races”, and was published monthly by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It was “conducted [meaning “edited”] by” W . E. Burghardt Du Bois (whom I have posted on before). I also got indexes to The Crisis, as of course her name is in those, and references to a couple of anthologies containing the story. I gave up!

But, it is worth noting that this story – by this author about whom nothing is known – has been anthologised, including in Dover Publication’s 100 Great American short stories. And, it’s also worth noting that The Crisis’ table of contents lists her as “Mrs”, so presumably “Butler” was her married name. It’s intriguing that they know nothing about her. No death or marriage records for example?

“Polly’s hack ride”

So, let’s just get to “Polly’s hack ride”, a very short story by a very unknown writer. The one-sentence summary I mentioned above simply says it “is a well-imagined tale of a young girl’s reaction to an infant sibling’s death”. Why the accolades – including a top-100 listing – for such a story?

Well, I think because it is a well-structured, beautifully told universal story of the irrepressibility of youth. The opening paragraph comprises one sentence, and goes like this:

POLLY GRAY had lived six and one-half years without ever having enjoyed the luxury of a hack ride.

Polly’s family is poor. Paragraph 2 tells us that she and her family live in a “little shanty, merely an apology for a house” and that Polly watches “with, envy, the finely dressed ladies and gentlemen riding by…” In Paragraph 3, we hear that she’s not brave enough to steal a ride on the back, “as she had seen her brothers do on the ice wagon” because she believes the “predictions of broken necks, arms, legs …”. However, in the next paragraph things are looking up:

Who then could say that Polly was wanting in sisterly love when she exulted in the fact that she was going to a funeral? What did it matter if Ma Gray was heart-broken, and Pa Gray couldn’t eat but six biscuits for his supper when he came home and found the long white fringed sash floating from the cracked door knob?

Paragraph 4 flashes back to tell of the death of two-year-old Ella, and then the story takes us through the funeral and hack ride to Polly falling asleep that evening. It is not until after the hack ride that Polly thinks about her actions:

As Polly alighted from the hack, she began to realize how, as a mourner, she had lowered her dignity by yelling from the window like a joy-rider, and she was not a little uneasy as to how Ma Gray would consider the matter should old Rummy [her great uncle] inform her. So during supper she cautiously avoided meeting his eye, and as soon as she had finished eating she ran upstairs to change her clothes.

There are many reasons why this story works so well. First is its tight structure and focus. The structure establishes Polly’s youth, and sets her desire for something impressive like a hack ride against her poverty. The focus stays firmly with Polly’s point of view. It is, in the background as readers know, a story about poverty and infant mortality, but it is also about children, and how they respond to the world they find themselves in. It’s not only Polly, but her siblings too who exhibit child-like responses to the death, with Bobby, after platefuls of “liver, onions and mashed potatoes” working hard to suppress a whistle and Sally trying “several bows of black ribbon on her hair to see which one looked best”.

In keeping with this child-perspective, the story is told with a light touch and quiet humour. Picture, for example, Polly leaning out of the hack on the way home from the funeral, yelling “Whee” to some friends as she waves her “black-bordered handkerchief”. This tone doesn’t deny the tragedy of death, but again lets us see it from the response of children who cannot be kept down for long. The result is a hopeful story despite the toughness of life.

The story ends with one more paragraph after Polly has run upstairs after dinner. In one sentence it contrasts Polly’s contrition with the joy of the ride. She knows what’s right, but can’t help herself.

Emma E. Butler
“Polly’s hack ride” (first published in The crisis, 1916)
in Christine Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by African-American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2015
pp. 57-60
ISBN: 9780486471396
Available online (you can find the whole journal issue at this link)

Jessica White, Silence is my habitat (#BookReview)

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Those of us who follow Jessica White have been waiting for the biography of nineteenth century botanist, Georgiana Molloy, that we know she has been researching, but then, almost out of the blue, appeared something a little different, a collection of ecobiographical essays titled, Silence is my habitat.

Published under the beautiful Upswell imprint, Silence is my habitat takes us on a journey with White as she navigates her grief over her mother’s death, tying into it, as she goes, the many strands that have comprised her life to date. Like her hybrid memoir, Hearing Maud (my review), Silence is my habitat defies easy categorisation. It’s not straight biography or memoir, and while it presents as a collection of essays, they are not, for all their careful end-noting, your typical formal essay. This is why I like White. She is out there in the vanguard thinking about what makes us who we are and about how to write about it, honestly and openly. On her website, she explains her book thus:

While a biography chronicles a person’s life, an ecobiography details how a person’s sense of self is shaped by their environment. My forthcoming essay collection, Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays, details how deafness shapes my relationship with different environments, such as the bush, bodies of water, archives, and institutions.

In this book, then, the self is herself, not Georgiana Molloy, though Molloy makes frequent appearances all the same. The book comprises eleven essays, some of which have been published before, in their entirety or in different forms.

Many strands

I wrote above that in Silence is my habitat, White incorporates “the many strands” of her life to date. They include, of course, her biography – her family-farm childhood, becoming deaf at the age of four, finding her partner, the motherhood question, and the wrenching death of her mother. They also include her academic and research life which have taken her around Australia and the world, and various other events and issues, such as the pandemic or, even, architecture.

Then, threading through and linking the essays (and these strands) are three main motifs – deafness, grief, and nature. Importantly, White opens with an Author’s Note in which she briefly discusses the “deaf” versus “Deaf” issue, advising that she will use the lowercase version for herself, but uppercase where it is the preference of people she references. Identity and nomenclature, as we know, is a fraught issue, so it is worth being upfront, as White is, clearly and respectfully.

So the essays … we start with scene-setting, in an essay appropriately titled “Grounding”. It gives us, effectively, her origin story, ending with the expected, but nonetheless devastating death of her mother. Referencing the etymology of the word “essay”, she concludes:

To write an essay is to make an attempt, to test or try out one’s responses to a subject, emotionally, intellectually and psychologically … Perhaps this is why I turned to the form in the year following my mother’s death. (“Grounding”)

Essays, though, can take many forms, with White adopting here a discursive style, which, in this case, relies largely on vignettes and digressions to explore that essay’s main theme. This approach encourages us to see the world holistically – to look for connections (and perhaps find more for ourselves) – rather than follow one line of argument. In “Hostile architecture”, for example, White starts by referencing two specific uses of architectural features to deter, respectively, pigeons and homeless people. Then, through vignettes which shift between her own experiences and the research of others, she explores ways of “accommodating” workers with disabilities. She talks specifically about DeafSpace, a concept developed at/for Gallaudet College, and closes by bringing these personal and informational strands together to make the essay’s main point about Universal Design that just might suit us all.

These are elegantly written essays, which is easier to say than to explain because, to some degree, it’s indefinable. But, I’ll give it a try. I see it as a combination of several things. The language, for one. White interweaves straight information from academic research with small narratives from moments in her life, gorgeous descriptions of nature, and expression of deep, sometimes heart-breaking emotion.

Then there’s the way White develops her essays. For example, “Intertwining”, which follows the aforementioned “Hostile architecture”, starts very differently – on something personal, with White scrambling over rocks in Cumbria, and thinking about Georgiana Molloy who had left that region for Western Australia in 1829. The rest of the essay focuses mostly on Molloy’s life, but told through personal and ecobiographical perspectives which include White interweaving her own painful journey to non-motherhood with the story of Molloy, who buries two children and distracts herself from grief “by turning to the natural world”. Another recurrent perspective appears here, the colonial project, because the Molloys were, of course, part of “the colonisation [that] crept across the south-west like a parasitic vine”, and has resulted in ongoing stress on “weathered soils … never meant to sustain large numbers of humans”. The essay ends, neatly, with White standing on Cape Freycinet, near where the Molloys had lived, and coming to terms with her own life and choices.

And finally, there’s the sophistication of the ideas being explored through this ecobiographical framework. The concept – of understanding how a person’s sense of self is shaped through their interaction with their ecosystem – is easy enough to grasp, but conveying that in a nuanced way for any particular individual is the challenge.

For White, the self has, since she was four, been framed by her deafness. It made her, from that young age, “observant and quiet” which, given she was a farm girl, meant she developed the kinship with the natural world that imbues all the essays. Deafness also made her dependent on her family until she was in her mid-thirties. From this she develops ideas about interdependencies – between people, between people and culture, and between people and the environment. Through her essays, White teases out how these facts of her life – deafness and dependencies/interdependencies – make her who she is including informing her understanding of the world. They give her a particular way of seeing that she translates for us. For example, she writes of research into ecoacoustics, and how even soil has sound. Degraded soils, however, are quieter, which causes her to suggest:

If ecosystems are quiet, it seems that we should pay attention to them. (“On the wing”)

Silence is my habitat is the sort of writing I enjoy. It’s intelligent, heartfelt, confronting and confident – and, by the end, White has found not only the space to grieve but a way forward. That way forward includes recognising the interdependence of all things:

If silence is our habitat, it is one that engenders contemplation, compassion and creativity. It prompts us to seek connection, for we understand innately that to be alone is dangerous. Our lives are intimately bound up with, and depend upon, other creatures. In losing them, we lose ourselves. (“Balancing”)

Ecobiography, I can see, has much to offer.

Jessica White
Silence is my habitat: Ecobiographical essays
Perth: Upswell, 2025
170pp.
ISBN: 9781763733121

Carmel Bird, Crimson velvet heart (#BookReview)

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If you have read Carmel Bird’s memoir Telltale (my review), you will know about her love of story, particularly of history, and fairy story, and legends. You will also know about her love of objects, of beautiful objects or strange ones, and of the meanings embodied within them. And, if you have read anything by Carmel Bird, you will know her light touch, even when dealing with the most serious subjects. All these coalesce beautifully in her latest novel, which is also her first work of historical fiction, Crimson velvet heart.

“wars and princesses”

Crimson velvet heart is set during the latter part of the reign of Louis XIV (1638-1715). It tells the story of the “all but forgotten” Princess Marie Adélaïde of Savoy (1685-1712), who, in 1686 at the age of 11, is brought to France to marry Louis’ grandson, the Duke of Burgundy. Why? Well, it’s all to do with “wars and princesses”. Adélaïde’s fate was sealed by the Treaty of Turin which had been negotiated that very year between her father, the “wily” Victor Amadeus, and Louis. It ended Savoy’s involvement in the Nine Years War, and central to it was Adélaïde’s marriage. She was, effectively, a spoil of war, or, as the narrator more pointedly puts it, “a prize in a party game”. The wedding takes place the following year, when Adélaïde is 12, but is not consummated for another two years, after she becomes “a woman”. Her job, of course, is to produce an heir.

Bird’s novel tells the story of Adélaïde’s life from birth to death, but primarily focuses on her years at Court, which are cut short in 1712, when she dies, most likely of measles. She had, however, done her duty, having produced the required heir, the boy who was to become Louis XV. These are the essential facts.

However, when an author decides to write historical fiction, I want to know why. In the case of Crimson velvet heart, I see two reasons – one historical, the other more general. The historical comprises two questions which become apparent as the novel progresses but are put explicitly by the narrator near the end. They are: “Did Adélaïde really spy successfully for her father?”, and “Was the love between Adélaïde and Louis XIV ever consummated?”. The narrator then adds, slyly, “Is the second question more interesting than the first?” Now that’s a loaded question. Regardless, these two questions have occupied the minds of historians ever since, but we will never know the answers.

Crimson velvet heart, then, uses these two specific questions to frame a lively, engaging read about one of those fascinating periods in history that is populated by people – like Louis and Adélaïde – who lived large lives which have captured the imagination of people ever since. The novel portrays court life – its schemes and jealousies, excesses and dangers, and, of course, its splendour. The realities – the forever wars, the religious persecution, the disparity in wealth, the poor health (including terrible teeth) – are set against the opulence of lives lived in palaces and gardens, at balls and on horseback.

It is to Bird’s credit that she can juggle telling an entertaining story full of romance and intrigue, while simultaneously adding complexity to our thinking about history and humanity. She achieves this partly through using two narrators. One is the more traditional omniscient third person narrator, though “traditional” is not a word I’d ever use for Bird, while the other is one of the few fictional characters in the novel, a young nun, Sister Clare, who knew Adélaïde in her years at court and tells her story first person from a time after Adélaïde’s death. Whilst it’s not a rigid demarcation, the third person focuses mostly on the historical facts, including the wars and treaties, and on filling in background that Clare couldn’t know, while Clare provides the personal touch, offering (imagined) insights into who Adélaïde might have been. Clare’s picture is of a resourceful young woman, who is vibrant and enchanting, who suffers loss and pain, but who can also be manipulative and cruel.

However, Clare is also everywoman, a person who, through writing her “Storybook”, tries “to make sense of life’s bewilderments”. She’s like all of us who live through a time and only know what we can glean from our own observations and research, which in Clare’s time of course was primarily through conversations with others. Our narrator, on the other hand, has the advantage of a wider historical sweep, so understands more, though can’t know what isn’t known (if you know what I mean!) This is where Bird’s tone shows most. Her narrator offers a wise and thoughtful perspective, but with a lightly wry and knowing touch that is pure Bird. It starts early on, when the narrator reports on the priest’s blessing of the newly-born Adélaïde and her mother:

He commends them to the happiness of everlasting life. Time will tell. (p. 6)

That little addition, “time will tell”, told me I would enjoy this narrator’s point of view.

Bird also uses recurring motifs to underpin her story and its meaning. This is a story focusing on women, so domestic motifs abound. Tapestry, embroidery and weaving, knots and pincushions, are the stuff of women’s lives but they also produce wonderful metaphors for a story about war and court intrigue. As does colour, with crimson evoking both richness and blood. So, we have gorgeous images galore, like Clare trying to understand the religious hatred that has Catholics persecuted in England, and Protestants in France:

It is like … a tapestry sewn by lunatics so that it makes no sense as a picture. (p. 48)

The novel’s title, itself, refers to a crimson velvet heart pincushion in which Louis’ “secret wife”, Madame de Maintenon, keeps track of religious conversions, because “when there was one less Protestant in the world, then the world was a better place”.

There is another logic to these motifs, however, because tapestries, embroideries, and artworks are among the limited primary historical sources available to the historian of long-ago times. Bird’s narrator references these and cautions that “like the camera, the artist’s brush can lie, leaving a false trail for the historian to follow”.

Earlier in this post, I suggested there were two responses to the question about why Carmel Bird might have chosen to write this novel. My second encompasses the novel’s exploration of a universal that is uncomfortably relevant today, the complex relationship between war, territory and religion, and its comprehension of the paradoxes of human behaviour, in which love and betrayal, cruelty and kindness, reside side-by-side.

In the end, Crimson velvet heart presents just what Sister Clare set out to do when she began her Storybook, “a vision of the world in all its beauty, and with all its flaws”. It also embodies serious ideas about the art of history and storytelling. A wonderful read.

Carmel Bird
Crimson velvet heart
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2025
309pp.
ISBN: 9781923023512

Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge.

Kim Kelly, Touched (#BookReview)

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In 2023, novelist Kim Kelly was one of the two winners of Finlay Lloyd’s inaugural 20/40 Publishing Prize, with her 1920s-set historical novel, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room (my review). Publisher Julian Davies had hoped at the time to award one fiction and one nonfiction prize, but there was a dearth of good nonfiction entries. That was rectified in 2024, with Sonya Voumard’s book on dystonia, Tremor (my review), being one of the two winners. This year, Kim Kelly returned with a nonfiction work on anxiety, titled Touched: A small history of feeling – and won again.

There is an obvious similarity between these two nonfiction winners, given both deal with medical conditions that impinge significantly on their writers’ lives. However, as quickly becomes apparent, the similarity is superficial, probably due to their writers’ origins. Voumard and Kelly are both published authors with other books to their names, but Voumard is a journalist while Kelly is a novelist, and this I think informs their different approaches to their subject matter.

Finlay Lloyd describes Touched like this:

Why this book is different
Documenting the damaging role of anxiety in our lives is hardly new, but Touched takes us inside the destabilising riot of a three-day panic attack with such insight, honesty and humour that the perspective we gain is revelatory and overwhelmingly hopeful.

Why we liked it
This book has a wonderful breadth of understanding—of the author’s own crazily complex family, of the wider issue of anxiety across society, and of her own voyage as a highly competent yet vulnerable being in a worryingly unhinged world.

Both Voumard and Kelly use a personal narrative arc to frame their discussions. For Voumard it’s the brain surgery she is about to undertake as her book opens, while for Kelly it’s the three-day panic attack she has leading up to her Masters graduation ceremony. Kelly’s focus is this attack. She takes us into it, viscerally. It is the emotional and narrative core of this book. Voumard, on the other hand, weaves her own story through a wider story about dystonia, in which she explores its different forms and treatments through the experiences of others as well as her own. Both writers situate their conditions within a wider societal context, but very differently.

And here I will leave Voumard. After all, she has her own review already!

Kelly starts her book with an (unlabelled) author’s note in which she explains that memory is slippery, so dates and details may not be precise, but “everything in this memoir is true, in essence and in feeling”. I like this, because no-one can remember all the tiny details, and in most cases – crime, excepted – they are not important. What is important is being truthful to the experience, and this, I feel, Kelly achieves.

“It’s exhausting, being human”

Touched is divided into two parts – the lead up to graduation day, and then graduation day and its aftermath. Within these parts are single-word titled chapters starting, logically, with “contact”, and her contradictory responses to “touch”, to how physical touch can settle her but can also produce anxiety when it involves people she doesn’t know well, like, say, hairdressers, doctors and dentists. As for masseurs, no way! But “touched” of course has other meanings, including:

To be in touch, to communicate. To have the touch, a skill at something. To be touched, to be momentarily captured by some sentiment. To live in a vague state of craziness. To feel. Small word, wonderfully big inside its tight dimensions of spelling and sound.(p. 14)

Kelly, who is a book editor as well as a novelist, loves words, so her memoir is written with the eye of someone who is deeply engaged with the meanings of words and how they convey feelings. As graduation day approaches, and she and her partner drive to Sydney for it, she suffers an excruciating panic attack which she describes with a clarity that is revelatory for those like me who have not experienced that degree of psychic distress. At the same time, she looks back to history – including to the Ancient Greeks and philosophers like Aristotle – for ideas on anxiety. And she flashes back to her own past, exploring how and where and why it all began. Her Jewish roots, the experiences of poverty and war in her Irish Catholic tree, the insecurities of her parents, her own childhood fears, and wider societal issues like the imposter syndrome that is particularly common among women, all come into the frame.

It’s not all distress and misery, however, because in between her mulling she shares her wins, her strategies, and her optimistic self that keeps on going. The writing is beautiful, slipping between information-sharing, straight narrative, and light or lyrical, rhythmical moments when she takes a breath and so do we.

Touched is a personal story, and so, by definition, it can be intensely self-focused at times. However, the intensity serves a purpose for those unfamiliar with what anxiety can do. Further, with a keen sense of tone, Kelly regularly reins it in so it never wallows. At the time of her writing, she tells us, around 17% of Australians had experienced some form of anxiety disorder. That’s nearly one in five of us. This book is for all those people – and for the rest of us who know someone who has experienced it, or who might ourselves experience it one day. We just never know. We should thank Kim Kelly for putting herself out there, so beautifully and so honestly.

Read for Novellas in November (as novella-length nonfiction) and Nonfiction November, but not quite finished in time!

Kim Kelly
Touched: A small history of feeling
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2025
142pp.
ISBN: 9780645927030

Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the dead: A writer on writing (#BookReview)

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My reading for Buried in Print Marcie’s annual MARM month has been both sporadic and minimal, to say the least, but this year I finally got to read a book that has been on my TBR shelves for a long time and that I have planned to read over the last few MARMs. It’s Atwood’s treatise (or manifesto or just plain ponderings) on writing, Negotiating with the dead. Interestingly, in 2003 it won the Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) for Autobiography/Memoir. I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, though on reflection I can see it does have a strong element of memoir.

Its origins, however, are not in memoir but in the series of lectures she delivered at the University of Cambridge in 2000, the Empson Lectures, which commemorate literary critic, William Empson. (I recently – and sadly – downsized his most famous book, Seven types of ambiguity, out of my library). Atwood turned those lectures into this set of essays that was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002 (and that I leapt on when I saw it remaindered in 2010).

Subtitled “A writer on writing”, this book is probably not quite what most of us would expect, unless we really know Atwood. As she says in her Introduction, it is not so much about writing as about something more abstract, more existential even, about what is writing, who is the writer, and what are the writer’s relationships with writing, with the reader, with other writers, and with themself. It’s also about the relationship between writing and other art forms, like painting and composing. She says in her Introduction that “it’s about the position the writer find himself in; or herself, which is always a little different”. (Love the little gender reference here.) It’s about what exactly is the writer “up to, why and for whom?”

I rarely do this, but I’m sharing the table of contents for the flavour it gives:

  • Introduction: Into the labyrinth
  • Prologue
  • 1 Orientation: Who do you think you are? What is “a writer,” and how did I become one?
  • 2 Duplicity: The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double Why there are always two?
  • 3 Dedication: The Great God Pen Apollo vs. Mammon: at whose altar should the writer worship?
  • 4 Temptation: Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, Mephisto & Co. Who waves the wand, pulls the strings, or signs the Devil’s book?
  • 5 Communion: Nobody to Nobody The eternal triangle: the writer, the reader, and the book as go-between
  • 6 Descent: Negotiating with the dead Who makes the trip to the Underworld, and why?

There is way too much in the book for me to comment on, but I don’t want to do a general overview either, so I’m just going to share a couple of the ideas that interested me.

One of her main threads concerns “duality” and “doubleness” in writers’ lives. There’s a fundamental duality for a writer – a novelist anyhow – between “the real and the imagined”. She suggests that an inability to distinguish between the two may have had something to do with why she became a writer. This interested me, but it’s not what interested me most in this book. Rather, it was the idea of the writer’s “doubleness”, which she introduces in chapter 2, “Duplicity”, the idea that there is the person who writes and the other person who lives life (walking the dog, eating bran “as a sensible precaution”, and so on). She explains it this way:

All writers are double, for the simple reason that you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read. Too much time has elapsed between composition and publication, and the person who wrote the book is now a different person.

It’s obvious, of course, but we don’t often think about it. Writers do, though. Take Sofie Laguna, for example. In the recent conversation I attended, she said she wished she’d kept a diary when she was writing her novel to capture the “dance” she’d had between the conscious and the subconscious as she worked through the issues she was confronting. In other words, the Sofie in front of us was not the Sofie who had written that book. In chapter 5, “Communion”, Atwood addresses this issue from a different angle when she talks about the relationship between writers and readers.

Back to the writer, though, Atwood talks about, gives examples of, how different writers handle this doubleness, the degree to which they consciously separate their two selves or don’t. This brought to my mind Brian Castro’s Chinese postman (my review) in which he regularly – consciously of course – shifts between first person and third for the same character, a character who owes much to Castro himself but is not Castro. This may be similar to the example she gives, Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Borges and I”. It’s also something Helen Garner has often discussed, such as in her essay “I” published in Meanjin in Autumn 2002. Even in her nonfiction works, she “creates a persona”, one that “only a very naive reader would suppose … is exactly, precisely and totally identical with the Helen Garner you might see before you”. My point in saying all this is that I think Atwood is exploring something interesting here. Is it new? I don’t know, but it captures ideas I’m seeing both in statements like those of Laguna and Garner, and in recent fiction where I’m noticing an increasing self-consciousness in writers who are explicitly striving for new forms of expression.

Another double Atwood discusses – one related to but also different from the above – is that between the writer and the writing. The writer dies, for example, but the writing lives on. It brought to mind that murky issue concerning posthumous publication (which was discussed on 746 Books Cathy’s Novellas in November post about Marquez’s Until August). It’s a bit tangential, I guess, but Atwood’s separation of the writer and the writing, her sense of the doubleness of writers, puts another spin on this conundrum.

She discusses other issues too, including that of purpose, to which she gives two chapters (3 and 4), setting the art-for-art’s sake supporters against the moral purpose/social relevance proponents, and which of course touches on that grubby issue of writing to earn money!

It’s an erudite book, in that she marshals many writers, known and unknown to me, to illustrate her ideas, but the arguments are also accessible and invite engagement. I did have questions as I read, but she managed to answer most of them. A good read.

Read for Marcie’s #MARM2025

Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the dead: A writer on writing
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002
219pp.
ISBN: 9780521662604

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 16, Edna Davies

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Of all the forgotten writers I’ve researched, Edna Davies proved by far the most difficult. Even AustLit had nothing on her besides a list of a few works, but she intrigued me so I soldiered on. This post, like most of my recent Forgotten Writers posts, a revision, with a little bit of added information, of the one I posted there.

Edna Davies

So, for my AWW post I started at the end, where we get some facts. Her death was reported on 26 December 1952 in the Family Notices section of The Pioneer (from Yorketown, South Australia). It said she was 56 years old, which suggests she was born in 1896. The notice gives her name as Edna Irene, identifies her parents, and names her siblings as Daisy, Keith and Jack (deceased).

There are two other entries for her in the newspaper in December. On 12 December, a brief article announced that ‘Miss Edna Davies, “Pioneer” representative and correspondent, has been absent for some weeks because of ill health, and is at present in hospital, where she may have to spend some time yet’. They identify someone who will gather news, and add that “until Miss Davies’ return to Minlaton, advertisements, or payment of accounts, should be sent direct to the Pioneer Office”, which suggests she had an administrative role. They conclude this announcement, by saying that ‘The weekly feature “Comments on the News” (Written by Miss Davies) will, we regret, have to be temporarily suspended”, which confirms her writing contribution.

On 26 December, the same day the death notice appeared, they published a brief obituary. Here it is in full:

Press and Radio Correspondent Dies
Yorke Peninsula generally will feel the loss of Miss Edna Davies, of Minlaton who died in an Adelaide Hospital on Monday. Miss Davies, whose name is particularly familiar to readers of “The Pioneer,” has served many years as Southern and Central Yorke Peninsula’s chief correspondent for radio stations, provincial and metropolitan newspapers. People in many Peninsula towns will miss the friendly weekly phone calls she used to make in her search for news about the doings of local organisations and people. Her articles, as well as her Peninsula news items, have been of great value and interest, and we join her brother and sister and our readers in mourning her sudden demise.

So, it’s likely that she was born in Minlaton, central Yorke Peninsula, which is about 30 kms north of Yorketown, the home of her employer The Pioneer. Indeed, on 20 March 1926, a brief article appeared in The Pioneer, headed “Minlaton. Farewell to Miss Edna Davies”. The article describes an event that was held at the Minlaton Institute “to bid farewell to Miss Edna Davies and Mr. Jack Davies” (presumably the brother mentioned in the death notice.) They were leaving for London. (Indeed, according to Adelaide’s The Register, they left on 20 March). There were “eulogistic addresses” and “a useful cheque” was handed to Miss Davies. What does this tell us? Not a lot, but we can glean some information. She was around 30 years old, and seemingly not married. She was known in the community, at least enough for her departure to be reported on, albeit social news was more common at the time. It also tells us – from the headline – that it was she, not her brother, who was most known.  

Since writing my AWW post, I have done more research, and have discovered something about why she was known in the community. For example, Adelaide’s Observer (3 November 1923), writing on the Central Yorke’s Peninsula Agricultural Society’s annual show, observed that “the show committee provided the dinner … under the able management of Miss Edna Davies … Things worked smoothly in this department”. The article also praises the work of the Society’s secretary, Mr D.M.S. Davies, Edna’s father.

Anyhow, back to her chronology, three months after the report of her going to London, Moonta’s The People’s Weekly (12 June 1926) writes about the Minlaton Literary Society’s fourth annual musical and elocutionary competitions, advising that entries go to “secretary (Miss Edna Davies)”. This must have been a clerical error because, from the many newspaper reports under her by-line – and headed “Travel” or “Our London Letter” – it’s clear that she was in England by June 1926, then through 1927 and probably into early 1928. It’s possible that some of the articles dated later in 1928 were written back home.

Certainly, on 31 May 1929, there is a report in The Pioneer of the Minlaton Institute Literary Society’s seventh annual musical and elocutionary competitions and once again entries were to go to secretary Edna Davies. She probably was back on the job then. From this time, there are more articles, stories and columns – including her “Comments on the News” – by her South Australian papers. Together they build up a picture of who she was, and what she thought about life – local, national and international.

One that captured my attention was written from England, and published in The Pioneer on 6 January 1928. She starts by saying she hadn’t been doing much sightseeing so was “short of material” for her London Letter. So, she writes about some reading she’s doing about Australia, including a book by Mr Fraser. From what she says, I believe the book was Australia: The making of a nation (1911/12) by Scottish travel writer John Foster Fraser. Chapter 19 is tilted “A White Australia”. Fraser, a man of his times, understands the desire for a “white Australia”, but asks this:

What will Australian people say when the question is put to them, “As you are not developing this region [the great uninhabited north], what right have you to prohibit other people from developing it? It was not your land in the first instance. You obtained it by conquest that was peaceful. What can you do to resist conquest by force of arms? Who are you to say to the world, Let other peoples crowd together and be hungry owing to congestion of population, live cramped and struggling lives, but we, although doing practically nothing to develop our own resources, do not want anybody else to come in and develop the resources of a part of the world not given to us but given to the human race?'”

Davies is taken with this question and asks, “Have we all studied the pros and cons of the question carefully, so that should it be wanted, we can without hesitation give a carefully thought out decision after viewing the question from all sides. Looking back through history we see that no nation has ever come into, or held its own, without fighting for it, so why should we be an exception”. Her thinking – and Foster’s thinking – is not our thinking, but that she took the issue up and was published tells us something about her and the times. Neither of course consider that “little” line of Foster’s that “It was not your land in the first instance”.

Another randomly chosen example of her thinking comes from 20 June 1952, when she writes in her column “Comments on the News”:

READING about a press conference Mr. Menzies had recently in London this thought struck me — “What much wider outlook British pressmen seem to have than do their colleagues in Australia.”
And that’s a bad thing for Australia. Because if pressmen haven’t a wide outlook how can the public, who depend on them for news of the outside world, be expected to have one.

She slates it to the “old problem” of Australia’s geographic isolation, suggesting that “we are so isolated from other places that it it [sic] hard to realise that their welfare and their doings are important to us”.

AustLit lists 5 stories by her, and AWW lists 12 short stories in Stories from online archives (11 from the 1930s and 1 from the 1940s), but these are just a few of many short stories by her that were published in South Australian newspapers, and The Bulletin. I shared one of The Bulletin stories in my AWW post. Titled “Scrub”, it’s perfect “Bulletin-fare”, with its story of a woman who cannot get over a childhood nightmarish experience in the bush, and an intriguing take on lost-child-in-the-bush tradition in Australian culture.

Edna Davies turned out to be another example of an independent woman who seems to have made a career for herself in journalism and writing.

Sources

Edna Davies, “Scrub“, The Bulletin, Vol. 56 No. 2906 (23 Oct 1935)

All other sources are linked in the article.

Angus Gaunt, Anna (#BookReview)

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Last month, I posted on the winners of the 2025 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize, of which Angus Gaunt’s Anna was one. I am thrilled with this prize, not only because I love the novella form, but because of the variety of stories we are seeing. So far the fiction winners have been an historical novel from Kim Kelly, a contemporary coming-of-age novel from Rebecca Burton, and an audacious “what if” story from PS Cottier and NG Hartland. Three very different books, and now Anna makes it four.

When I started reading Anna, I thought I was heading into a dystopian novel. It is told third person from Anna’s perspective, and starts with her walking in the woods. A young man is following her. The woods are not identified, and neither is the young man, but she recognises him as a guard from the place she’s just left. Through their initial interaction, we learn that “the war is over” and the gates had been opened. Therefore, she firmly implies, he has no jurisdiction over her.

Anna, we discover as her journey continues, is about 15 years old, and had been taken to a labour camp with her family about three years ago. Her parents had died but she’s hoping her remaining siblings are ahead of her, safe in the exodus she’d missed. We know nothing about the woods – but they do not sound Australian – nor do we know the time setting. It is cold. There are some generic animals and plants – deer, hares, mushrooms, berries. The story focuses on Anna’s thought processes and her survival. There is almost nothing about the sociopolitical situation that got her there. We do know that Anna and the guard speak different languages, which suggests an invasion or some sort of oppression of minorities, but Gaunt does not go there. The notes I made during my reading, include this: “Timeless, placeless, non-political, means not dystopian? More allegory?”

The judges don’t call it either of these, but on “why this book is different” they say:

Winter is only beginning to thaw in a remote forest as Anna treks for her survival, accompanied by someone she cannot trust. With distilled clarity, this short novel carries the reader on a journey from victimhood to self-possession.

So, it is about survival, or, more precisely, about the inner resources you need to develop to overcome a dire situation.

Anna is a moving and absorbing read. Gaunt quickly engages our sympathy for his protagonist, young and defenceless in the woods. The language in the first two paragraphs sets up uncertainty. It starts:

Anna had already walked further than she meant to, but did not want to go back, not yet. She was basking in the sun … also in the silence. She had not done something like this for a long time … (p. 9)

Then she stops and looks up, where she sees “a large predatory bird … floating on secret air currents, delicate wing tips spread”. “Predatory” but “delicate”. Should we be worried? Then she sees the young guard, later identified as Yevgeny. He’s very young, uncertain, and in a show of bravado he tries to shoot the bird, but fails. He’s never shot anything before. And so the narrative and its main characters are established. Anna is alert, sensitive, intelligent and has some nous and wisdom about her. The guard, also young, lacks confidence, experience and nous, and is confused about his role as a man, a soldier, a human. This makes him potentially dangerous but also vulnerable. We – like Anna – are on the watch for which way he might go.

And so the novel progresses as this uneasy, wary-of-each-other pair journey through the woods, looking for the railroad and its promise of civilisation. Early on, during a brief time when she and Yevgeny are not together and she has returned to the camp, Anna meets a dying man who gives her his last food. Then later, together, they come across a cottage containing a barely surviving couple.

This brings another literary form to mind, the journey narrative, the search for home, a new one or old one, and – perhaps – for self. In journey narratives, physical and spiritual or emotional challenges are faced, and people are met. The journeyer must rely on inner resources to overcome the challenges, including assessing whether the people met are to be trusted or not. This is what we watch Anna do. We are privy to her thoughts as she goes, as she draws together past knowledge and present experience, and we gain confidence in her ability to make good decisions. Nearly half way through the story, her mind drifts to the schoolroom. It is comforting, but she stops herself,

recognising that she was attracted by the emotion of it rather than its practical application. There was not room for emotion. She was glad of this thought. Feelings and emotion could only cloud the mind, waste precious resources. All resources were precious. Her mind was clear now. She had a choice to make and she made one. (p. 56)

Of course it’s not a straight line, and Anna, like any journeyer under stress, slips back several times before getting a grip once more.

Anna is beautiful to read, from the first sentence. The language is tight but expressive. The necessary tension is off-set by moments of tenderness and hope, not to mention some subtle foreshadowing. And the characterisation is warm and empathetic.

I concluded my post on last year’s winner, The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin, that it was an audacious “what if” story. Anna is also audacious, in a different way. It calls on the tropes of established forms, like allegory and the journey narrative, but makes them into something new, something that confronts issues like trust and power in a way that feels both modern and timeless.

Read for Novellas in November.

Angus Gaunt
Anna
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2025
110pp.
ISBN: 9780645927047

Review copy courtesy Finlay Lloyd.

Teffi, The examination (#Review, #1925 Club)

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Mostly for the Year Clubs, I read an Australian short story, usually from one of my anthologies. However, for 1925, I couldn’t find anything in my anthologies, so turned to other newspaper-based sources, including Trove, but I mainly found romances or works that were difficult to access. And then, out of the blue, I found something rather intriguing, a story titled “The examination”. It was written by a Russian woman named Teffi, translated into English by J.A. Brimstone, and published in The Australian Worker, an Australian Workers’ Union newspaper, on 25 November 1925. I don’t know when it was originally written, nor have I been able to found out who J.A. Brimstone was.

Who is Teffi?

The Australian Worker ascribes the story to N. Teffi. This nomenclature is interesting. My research suggests that Teffi, not N. Teffi, was the pen name of Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya (1872-1952). Wikipedia gives her pen name as Teffi, but its article on her is titled Nadezhda Teffi. Curiously, the article’s history page includes a comment from a Wikipedian, dated 11 June 2014, that “Her pen name is only Teffi, not Nadezhda Teffi”. This Wikipedian “moved” the article (Wikipedia-speak for changing titles) to “Teffi”, but it was later moved back to “Nadezhda Teffi”. Seems to me it should be under “Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya” or “Teffi”. But, let’s not get bogged down. There’s probably more I don’t know about how she used her name over time.

The more interesting thing is who she was. Wikipedia provides what looks like a fair introduction to her life, so I won’t repeat all that here. Essentially, it says she was a Russian humorist writer who could be both serious and satirical, but whose gift for humour was “considered anomalous for a woman of her time”. However, she proved them wrong, “skyrocketing to fame throughout Russia with her satirical writings, so much so that she had candies and perfume named after her”.

Literary scholar Maria Bloshteyn, writing in the LA Review of Books in 2016, would agree. She starts her piece by describing Teffi as “once a Russian literary superstar”, and says that “Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya claimed that she took the comic-sounding and intentionally androgynous nom de plume for good luck”. Bloshteyn writes:

She began to publish in her early 30s and tried her hand in various genres, but it was her short stories, with their keen and hilarious observations of contemporary society, that were read by everyone from washerwomen to students to top government officials. They won her literary success on a scale unprecedented in pre-Revolutionary Russia.

My short story, however, was written post-Revolution, given we are talking 1925. But, I’m jumping ahead. Tsar Nicholas II was a big fan, Bloshteyn says, as was Vladimir Lenin “with whom she worked in 1905 at the short-lived New Life [Novaia Zhizn’] newspaper”. She left Russia in 1919, during the “Red Terror” when things started to turn sour. Her popularity continued in the émigré world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, her books were read again and “celebrated as recovered gems of Russian humor”.

This potted history sounds very positive, but Bloshteyn explains that there was also darkness in her life, including the death of her loved father when she was young, difficult relationships with siblings, a failed marriage, mental health problems, and more. Also, “she became a victim of her immensely successful but severely confining brand”, meaning editors and readers “only wanted the Teffi they knew” and, worse, “they perceived all of her stories as funny, even when they were clearly tragic”. How frustrating that would be, eh?

She was inspired by – and has been likened to – Chekhov. Bloshteyn says:

Her appreciation of the absurd, of the comic minutiae of life, helps set off the darker or more transcendent aspects of our existence, but her main focus, in the tradition of the great 19th-century Russian writers, was always human nature itself: what makes us tick and why.

I’ll leave her biography here, but if you are interested, start at Wikipedia, and go from there.

“The examination”

“The examination” tells the story of a young girl, Manichka Kooksina, who is sitting for her end-of-year exams which will decide whether she moves on to the next grade. Important things ride on passing them, including staying with her friend Liza who has already passed and getting the new bike her aunt promised her if she passed. However, instead of knuckling down to study she fritters her time, trying on a new dress, reading, and finally filling her notebooks with a prayer “Lord, Help”, believing that if she writes it hundreds or thousands of times she will pass. Needless to say, she does not do well.

The story is beautifully told from her perspective, with much humour for the reader as she flounders her way through preparation and the exam itself. She feels persecuted, an animal being tortured, and resorts to the absurd solution of writing lines, while her nervous peers have at least tried. I wondered why this particular story of hers was chosen by The Australian Worker. Was it the only one available to them in English? Did the examination theme feel universally relevant? According to Bloshteyn, Teffi said that “even the funniest of her stories were small tragedies given a humorous spin”. This is certainly a “small tragedy” for the – hmm, foolish, procrastinating, but believable – Manichka.

Bloshteyn’s essay is primarily a review of two books that had been recently published, Tolstoy, Rasputin, others, and me: The Best of Teffi and Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea. The former includes sketches and some of her “best loved short stories”. GoodReads says of it that “in the 1920s and 30s, she wrote some of her finest stories in exile in Paris … In this selection of her best autobiographical stories, she covers a wide range of subjects, from family life to revolution and emigration, writers and writing”. I don’t know whether “The examination” is one of them, but Bloshteyn writes, of the child-themed stories she mentions, that all “show children in the process of getting to know the world around them and finding the means to cope with it”. Manichka, although showing some resourcefulness, has a way to go.

I was thrilled to find this little treasure in Trove, and will try to read more Teffi. Has anyone else read her?

* Read for the 1925 reading week run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) and Simon (Stuck in a Book).

N. Teffi
“The examination” [Accessed: 21 October 2025]
in The Australian Worker, 25 November 1925

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 15, Tarella Daskein

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I first came across Tarella Daskein back in 2021 when Bill (The Australian Legend) wrote a post about her as the result of her coming up in discussions and reading about Katharine Susannah Prichard. She then slipped my mind until a couple of months ago when I was searching around for a subject for my Australian Women Writers post that month. This post, like most of my recent Forgotten Writers posts, s a minor revision of the one I posted there.

Tarella Daskein

As with many of the lesser-known writers we research for this blog, Tarella Daskein (1877-1945) was somewhat challenging to pin down. It’s not that she wasn’t known. Indeed, Wikipedia and AustLit both have entries for her. However, there were conflicting details of her life. For example, both Wikipedia and AustLit had her death date as 1934, which was curious because Adelaide’s The Advertiser reported on her visiting that city in June 1935. How could that be? Further, The Advertiser also had her husband as Mr. T.S. Daskein while Wikipedia and other newspaper articles had him as Mr. T.M. Daskein. Compounding all this was her use of multiple names, including some confusion over her maiden name. The above-mentioned Advertiser, for example, reported it as Quinn. AustLit, however, resolved this by noting at the end of its entry that her name had been incorrectly spelled as ‘Quinn’ in Miller and Macartney’s Australian Literature: A Bibliography (1956). The death date issue was clarified by, strangely, Wikipedia’s article on her father, Edward Quin, which gave her death as 1945 and cited a newspaper notice as evidence. And a death notice for her husband confirms him as T.M. not T.S.

So, with all that resolved, who was this Tarella Daskein? Tarella Ruth Quin was born in Wilcannia, second daughter to pastoralist and one-time member of the New South Wales Legislature, Edwin Quin, in 1877. She is best known as a writer of children’s stories, but also wrote three adult novels – A desert rose (1912), Kerno (1914) and Paying guests (1917) – and many short stories which were published in contemporary newspapers and magazines. AustLit provides a good outline of her origins. She was one of eight children. Her father owned a dairy farm called ‘The Leasowes’, near Victoria’s Fern Tree Gully, and a sheep station called ‘Tarella’, after which she was named, in far western New South Wales near Wilcannia. ‘Ella’, as she was known, was educated in Adelaide, but spent most of her life on stations. She married Thomas Mickle Daskein, part proprietor of a station in far northwest NSW.

Cover for Tarella Quin Gum Tree Brownie

AustLit says that her first writing comprised short sketches of station life, which were published under the pseudonym “James Adare” in the Pastoral Review. At the editor’s suggestion, she also wrote some stories for children, which she sent to Ethel Turner, hoping to have them published in Sydney newspapers. However, Turner apparently recommended they be published as books. Her first book, Gum Tree Brownie, was published in 1910, with illustrations by Ida Rentoul whom Ella’s younger sister, Hazel, knew at school. This began a long partnership between the two, with Ida Rentoul Outhwaite illustrating many of her books for children. Wilde et al say she was “one of Australia’s most successful writers of fairy-stories for children” and that “humour, irony, a fluent, dramatic style and fantasy reminiscent of Lewis Carroll enliven her stories”.

Bill, as mentioned above, came across her, initially in Katharine Susannah Prichard’s autobiography, Child of the hurricane. Apparently, Prichard was governess for a year at Tarella Station in 1905, by which time Tarella, who was six years older than KSP, was already a published author. Prichard, says Bill, is “pretty dismissive” of Quin’s writing.

However, not all were. Several contemporary reviewers praised her adult novels, often singling out Kerno: A stone for special mention. On 10 April 1915, Adelaide’s Observer wrote:

Kerno, although similar in some respects, is nevertheless distinctly different from A Desert Rose. The latter is a novel – the former is a study – a keen analysis of human feelings and desires. One cannot well peruse the book without thinking deeply, and wondering what one would have done in circumstances like those in which the leading actors found themselves placed. Young people and those having a preference for light ephemeral literature may be inclined to consider the story rather tame; but all who have a true appreciation for human nature, and endeavour to probe into its many and varied qualities, will find in it compelling and absorbing interest.

Those who praise Kerno mostly praise it for its “real” characters and deep understanding of human nature. Indeed, the Observer says that it “richly deserves to rank among the best truly Australian novels”. Daskein was also praised for her understanding of and ability to convey life in the bush and, as the Observer says, for her “descriptive writing which … captivates the reader”.

Notwithstanding all this, Quin mostly wrote for children, with The Australian Women’s Weekly claiming, after the publication of Chimney Town in 1936, that

She has published more ambitious volumes, but her tales for children have a unique charm that makes one feel that this is her real metier.

Quin’s publishing career lasted from around 1907 to the mid-1930s, so it was no flash in the pan. AustLit lists over 20 works by her, but this may not be all. Regardless, she was well-known to readers of her time, and, according to Adelaide’s The Rouseabout, had some presence in literary circles, including being “a foundation member of the Melbourne centre of the P.E.N. Club and a constant attendant at its meetings”. She died on 22 October 1945, at a private hospital in Melbourne. The fact that I found little mention of this beyond The Rouseabout’s short article suggests that in the last decade of her life – after the death of her husband in 1937 – she faded from view.

The piece, “The camel”, which I chose for AWW, was published in The Bulletin’s Christmas issue in 1935. It shows a writer a writer who knows the outback, knows how to entertain her audience, and, who firmly belongs to the bush tradition. Life is tough, but our woman protagonist is resourceful.

Sources

Bill Holloway, “Tarella Down a Rabbit Hole“, The Australian Legend (blog), 16 December 2021 [Accessed: 9 November 2025]
The Rouseabout, “In Town and Out“, The Herald, 12 November 1945 [Accessed: 16 August 2025]
Tarella Quin, AustLit [Accessed: 16 August 2025]
Tarella Quin, Wikipedia [Accessed: 16 August 2025]
William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, The Oxford companion to Australian literature. Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2nd, edition, 1994