In early 2012, I wrote a post on nurturing Australian classics in which I mentioned, among other things, some publishing initiatives such as Text Classics and Sydney University’s Australian Classics Library. Text Publishing has continued since then to publish more and more titles, with over 70 titles now being available. Presumably this means that sales are good enough to support the project continuing. What’s particularly special about this series is that Text has commissioned new introductions for these books.

Around the same time I believe, Australian publisher Angus and Robertson also started publishing an Australian Classics series which they sell for similar prices to those by Text, that is in the $12-14 price range. The series doesn’t seem to have been promoted as well as the Text series, but there are some good books here. And, like Text’s series, they include non-fiction as well as fiction, and again like Text, the books can be purchased in print and e-versions.

I’ve been meaning to write about Angus and Robertson’s (A&R) series for some time, but what finally spurred me into action was seeing, recently, that they have republished Drusilla Modjeska’s wonderful book, Exiles at home: Australian writers abroad 1925-1945. I have dipped into this book many times, but always at the library. I didn’t buy it when it was first released in 1981, and have never organised myself to pick up a second-hand version. But now, now I have it – and I purchased the e-version so I could have it straight away. Somehow, and perhaps it’s obvious really, I’m more comfortable buying non-fiction in e-versions than fiction.

Exiles at home is an excellent book if you are interested in Australian classics, specifically Australian women’s classics, because Modjeska discusses in some depth, the women who led an impressive flowering of Australian literature in that period leading up to and including the Second World War. They include Dymphna Cusack, Christina Stead, Eleanor Dark, Marjorie Barnard and Kylie Tennant. Some I’ve reviewed here, while others I’ve read way before blogging existed and certainly before I started blogging. When Modjeska wrote her book, many of these authors would not have been in-print – but fortunately they were held in the library of the Australian National University where she started her research.

Now, though, many of those authors are published by A&R (and the other companies republishing classics). We can now buy the likes of Eleanor Dark’s The timeless land, Kylie Tennant’s The battlers, and Dymphna Cusack and Florence James’ Come in spinner from A&R, just as we can buy works by Henry Handel Richardson, Miles Franklin and Elizabeth Harrower from Text. We can also read the men, of course, such as George Johnston, Martin Boyd, Xavier Herbert and Kevin Gilbert via these publishers. (Patrick White, of course, has always been available – to some degree.)

I will, though, finish with the women since it was buying Modjeska’s book that inspired this post. She talks about two major flowerings of women writers in Australia – the period she was writing about and, in her introduction to later editions, the 1980s (when we saw Helen Garner, Kate Grenville, Elizabeth Jolley, Olga Masters, Glenda Adams among others, appear on the scene.). Modjeska refers to this uneven visibility of women’s writing. Given the recent discussions about this issue, in the light of various publishing and reviewing statistics, I thought I’d finish with this comment by Modjeska:

Writing the history of women’s writing is not simply a matter of filling the gaps, slotting people and works into existing literary traditions. Rather, it should be an attempt to unearth new, dialectically related history. The relationship of women writers to cultural history is, however, highly complex and is mediated by ideology, by class and by the ways in which women become social beings in the first place.

This is why, even though women seem to have been featuring well in recent Australian literary awards, we need to keep watching – and why we so appreciate publishers keeping our (male and female) literary traditions alive.