Meet the Author (ANU)

Monday musings on Australian literature: some Australian feminist “classics”

/ Whispering Gums / 35 Comments
Jane Caro, Accidental feminists

Tonight I went to an ANU/The Canberra Times Meet the Author event featuring author and journalist, Jane Caro, in conversation with local radio personality and booklover, Alex Sloan. It was of course inspired by Caro’s new book, Accidental feminists. So, I thought it might be fun this Monday Musings to just list some of Australia’s best-loved feminist books – in chronological order of publication.

While I call myself a feminist, I wouldn’t call myself an expert on the history of feminist writing in Australia – and most of what I’ve read I read before blogging so I have minimal reviews here. Consequently, I don’t want to pretend to be offering anything like a complete or thorough list. Instead, this list is just a taster, a sample, an introduction to some of the best-known books and writers. (Oh and I admit up-front that I’m using the term “classic” loosely as I will be including some rather recent books which might, in time, become classics.)

Here goes:

Louisa Lawson’s The Dawn: a feminist magazine published between 1888 and 1905, The Dawn was established by feminist Louisa Lawson (under the name, Dora Falconer). It became, according to Wikipedia, the official publication of the Australian Federation of Woman voters. The journal has been digitised on Trove, and this comes from its first issue, May 15, 1888.

Every eccentricity of belief, and every variety of bias in mankind allies itself with a printing machine, and gets its singularities bruited about in type, but where is the printing-ink champion of mankind’s better half? There has hitherto been no trumpet through which the concentrated voice of womankind could publish their grievances and their opinions … Here then is Dawn, the Australian Woman’s Journal and mouthpiece – phonograph to wind out audibly the whispers, pleadings and demands of the sisterhood.

Here we will give publicity to women’s wrongs, will fight their battles, assist to repair what evils we can, and give advice to the best of our ability.

Germaine Greer’s The female eunuch: first published in 1970. Reading this while still a teen was my founding feminist moment. I had been brought up believing I was equal, that I could go to university and get a job just like my brother and the boys around me, that I didn’t have to marry to live a good and enjoyable life, but Greer’s book gave me an understanding of the structural, personal, psychological issues behind the struggle women faced (and still face) to gain true equality.

Anne Summers, Damned whores and God's police

Anne Summers’ Damned whores and God’s police: first published in 1975, this book examines the two main stereotypes that are used to define women – “bad girls” who refuse to conform to society’s expectations of “the good girl”, or “good women” whose role it is to civilise society, to keep everyone else moral. Forty years on, Summers believed that, despite some progress, the stereotypes persist, and a revised edition of her best-selling book was published in 2016. Lisa (ANZlitLovers) posted on this book, focusing on the introduction to the new edition.

Jocelynne Scutt’s Different lives (ed): published in 1987, this is less a feminist treatise, than an anthology of writing by women who were active in the second wave of feminism (either formally through organisations or informally through individual action.) This is just one of feminist lawyer Scutt’s several books on feminist issues.

Dale Spender: I’ve included Spender here because of the volume of her writing on women’s issues, in the 1980s and 1990s in particular, rather than for one particular book. Her focus has largely been women writers, and their neglect. Her first book, Man-made language, analyses how the English language is constructed from a masculine point of view, and the ramifications of this. Other books include Writing a new world: Two centuries of Australian women writers and the provocatively titled The writing or the sex?, or, Why you don’t have to read women’s writing to know it’s no good. I have her Mothers of the novel: 100 good women writers before Jane Austen, in which, among other things, she discusses how and why the work of these early women writers has been lost while that of their male peers has entered the canon.

Tara Moss’ The fictional woman (my review): published in 2014, this explores her thesis that women’s lives and roles are subject to an inordinate number of fictions that contradict reality, and that this helps perpetuate ongoing inequalities for women in representation, status, value. I’m not sure of Moss’s longterm standing in feminist literature, but I found this an engaging read.

Clementine Ford, Fight like a girl

Clementine Ford’s Fight like a girl: published in 2016, this book belongs to the new generation of Australian feminists of whom Ford is clearly one of the frontrunners. The book’s starting point is that things have not changed for women – at least they haven’t changed enough. The book is therefore, writes Readings bookshop, “a call to arms for all women to rediscover the fury that has been suppressed by a society that still considers feminism a threat.”

There are many other Australian writers who explore aspects of women’s experience from a sociopolitical, and feminist, perspective, including Drusilla Modjeska’s Exiles at home, on Australia’s lively, fierce and often activist women writers of the 1930s; Diane Bell’s Generations on the way women pass on traditions; and Larissa Behrendt’s Finding Eliza (on my TBR) which takes on colonialism – and how the attendant stereotypes and myths have played out in the treatment of indigenous people, particularly women, since 1788. But, I had to stop somewhere…

Now, over to you: do you have any favourite feminist texts, Australian or otherwise, you’d care to share with us?

My literary week (14), lists and a celebrity

/ Whispering Gums / 22 Comments
I don’t really need to write a post today having written two in the last two days, but there are a couple of things I’d love to share with you, so here I am for the third day in a row.

Reading group schedule

Trent Dalton, Boy swallows universeFirst up is my reading group schedule for the first half of the next year, which we decided by consensus – with a bit of the usual argy-bargy – a few days ago. Here’s the list in the order we’ll read them:
  • Trent Dalton, Boy swallows universe : strongly recommended by an ex-member (“ex” because she moved away) whose recommendations are usually spot on – and with supporting recommendation by Brother Gums whose taste is also impeccable.
  • Anita Heiss (ed), Growing up Aboriginal in Australia : for obvious reasons, and because if the University of Melbourne believes its staff should read it, then so should we!
  • Marilynne Robinson, Gilead : because many of us have been wanting to “do” Marilynne Robison for some time.
  • Amor Towles, A gentleman in Moscow : because many of us have heard good things about it.
  • Sayaka Murata, Convenience store woman : because we’d like to include more translated fiction in our reading diet and this sounded interesting.
  • Mary McCarthy, The group : our “classic”, which some have never read and others are interested to read again in our current climate.
You will of course hear more about these as 2019 progresses …

Eric Idle in conversation with Alex Sloan

Eric Idle, Always look on the bright side of lifeAs most Aussie readers will know, Monty Python member Eric Idle is currently doing the rounds in Australia promoting his book Always look on the bright side of life: A sortabiography. I’m intrigued by that subtitle given the various discussions we’ve had here recently about memoirs and biography – but I haven’t read it yet so I can’t tell you what angle, if any, Idle has taken on the biography form.

Anyhow, the event I attended was part of the ANU/Canberra Times Meet the Author series, this one a paid event, with the ticket price including a signed copy of the book. I went with friends so didn’t take my usual copious notes. Indeed, I took no notes, so this will be a brief report.

I suspect most of the events ran pretty similarly, with a few variations depending on who “conversed” with Idle. Anne of Cat Politics, who occasionally comments here, went to the Melbourne event where the conversation was conducted by Michael Williams of The Wheeler Centre. She has written about it on her blog. We had a similar discussion, led beautifully by Alex Sloan, about Idle’s life and, career and his friendships with people like George Harrison. We also had a couple of songs, including the “Selfies” one (for which Anne provides a Youtube link.) Our event, like hers, ended up with Idle singing “Always look on the bright side of life”, except we had a small backing group, The Idlers, drawn from the Canberra Choral Society. That was fun – and I think they enjoyed themselves, too.

But, I think we may have had something else unique to us – a discussion about physics. Our event commenced with a YouTube video of Idle doing his “Galaxy Song”, after which ANU Vice-chancellor and Nobel Laureate in Physics, Brian Schmidt, came to the stage to introduce Idle. In doing so shared with us some – let us say – disagreements between Eric Idle and physicist Brian Cox about certain facts in the song. Schmidt suggested that, on one fact at least – to do with the power of the sun – he’s decided to agree with Idle. There was some lovely banter about all this, with Idle, who has performed the Galaxy Song with Cox, telling us that he’d told Cox that the facts were correct when he wrote the song: it was Science that had changed (due to that darned Hubble Telescope). You can Google Brian Cox and Eric Idle to find out more – if you haven’t seen them already.

Kate’s list of lists

As a service to us all, Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest) has published a post titled Best Books of 2018 – A List of Lists. In it she has listed the Best of 2018 lists already published by magazines and newspapers around the world – with annotations explaining what they cover. For example, of Esquire’s list she says “excellent mix of 50 fiction and nonfiction titles” and for NPR’s Best Books of 2018 she writes “use the filters to wade through this 300-strong list”.
Kate will be adding to this post as more lists are published. If you love book lists, bookmark her post!

Quote of the week

Clare Wright, You daughters of freedomHopefully, by the end of next week I’ll have written my post on Clare Wright’s You daughters of freedom, but I can’t resist sharing just one of many wonderful quotes from the book. This one is not Clare Wright’s own words, but a description of England’s “suffragette agitators” by the UK’s attorney-general at the time. He called them “those unsexed hyenas in petticoats”. Really!? You have to laugh!

 

Elizabeth Kleinhenz in conversation with Chris Wallace – about Germaine Greer

/ Whispering Gums / 9 Comments
Elizabeth Kleinhenz, Germaine Greer

It made for a busy night, given that the last Tuesday of the month is also my reading group night, but I had to go to this ANU Meet the Author event, because it involved Canberra academic/journalist (not to mention Germaine Greer biographer) Chris Wallace conversing with Elizabeth Kleinhenz, whose biography, Germaine: The life of Germaine Greer, has just been published.

MC Colin Steele commenced proceedings by introducing the participants, then noting that Germaine Greer’s archives had been bought a few years ago by the University of Melbourne for $3m! Not cheap, eh, but it is a significant collection about, as the back cover artwork says, “arguably one of the most significant and influential Australian women of her time.” Hmm, there are a lot of qualifications here – “arguably”, “one of the most”, “Australian”, “women” and “her time”. Whoever said this was not going out on a limb!

Anyhow, it was an excellent conversation – not just because it was about this fascinating woman, Germaine (b. 1939) but also because Chris Wallace led the conversation in a logically, but not rigidly, structured way and Elizabeth Kleinhenz was open and articulate in her responses. I’m glad I made the effort to attend.

First things first

To get things going, Wallace asked some general questions about the book itself. Its cover pic, for example. Kleinhenz responded that it was the publisher’s choice, though she was involved, I gather, in the discussion. They wanted a picture that would be attention-grabbing. And so it is.

Wallace, Steele and Kleinhenz,
Wallace, Steele and Kleinhenz, 2018, before the session

Wallace then asked about that back cover quote that I’ve already mentioned. It led to Kleinhenz talking about why she’d chosen Greer as her subject. She spoke about all the negative reactions she’d received on telling people that she was writing about Greer – comments like “that silly old bat”. But, Kleinhenz felt that Greer had made some significant contributions to women’s lives and that she’s an excellent scholar: she wanted to “set the record straight”.

She also said that Greer, despite her obvious impact on women’s lives, doesn’t like women (like me, for example) telling her that she’d changed their lives. “I didn’t change your life,” she apparently says, “you did.” Well yes, technically she’s right, but, without enlightenment from Greer, many of us may not have made the leaps we needed – or may have made them much more slowly – so I think our belief stands, whether or not Greer accepts it!

Anyhow, then, before getting into the nuts and bolts of the biography, Wallace asked Kleinhenz to say a little about her first biography on Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who is, apparently, another misunderstood woman. I won’t go into details, but Kleinhenz said she had always wondered why Kleinhenz, when offered a Professorship, had declined, saying she wasn’t good enough. She found the answer, she said, when researching Greer: it’s that women of Greer and Fitzpatrick’s generation were not brought up to be equal. Greer, said Kleinhenz, saw that women had to change themselves in order to move forward.

Wallace asked Kleinhenz how it was that we had moved from Fitzpatrick to Greer. Kleinhenz, born in the 1940s, related her own experience as a young women who, although she had a good job as a teacher, “just” wanted a house and family. However, when she got there she found it wasn’t enough. She realised, as Greer argues in The female eunuch, women could/should not blame men – doing so, in fact, cedes power to men – but must change ourselves. So, she did – she went back to work.

Early, mid and late Germaine

We then got into the guts of the conversation. With Greer now 80, how, asked Wallace, do we assess her? Kleinhenz felt that Wallace had got it right in her biography, Germaine Greer: Untamed shrew, recognising that Greer writes from where she’s at at the time. In that, said Kleinhenz, she is consistent!

However, later in her career, she said, it seems that Greer “went funny”. She is known to suffer depression. Maybe she wasn’t well. Her book, The boy (2003), about the beauty of young boys’ bodies, comes from, Kleinhenz feels, an unfortunate period in her life. But some years later, she bought the rainforest – which was in fact funded, I understand, from that sale of her archives. Kleinhenz suggested that this period marks her “return”.

Wallace, though, seemed not so sure, and asked Kleinhenz about Greer’s book On rape. Wallace is appalled by it, while Kleinhenz admitted to a “softer” response, one that she has also found amongst other women of her age. She admitted that Greer takes a very narrow definition of rape, but felt that Greer says some sensible things about the legal system, for example, and about the role of violence in rape.

Research and writing

The discussion then turned to biography writing. Wallace asked whether readers are surprised that people are, in fact, rounded, that is, not all good or all bad. Kleinhenz said that she tried not to be soft on Greer in her book, but she did find Greer an interesting woman. Greer has, in fact, a lot of friends – the implication being that she must have some good things going for her despite all her critics.

Wallace noted that Greer is charismatic, and wondered whether it’s been a problem that she has been too uncritically treated, here, rather than getting “energetic” Australian feedback. Kleinhenz agreed somewhat with this. There was some discussion, for example, about Greer’s taking a cultural relativist view towards female genital mutilation, rather than opposing it categorically. Kleinhenz suggested that Greer has been criticised in Australia – but “of the silly old bat” variety rather than more “critical” criticism, that is, serious analytical discussion of her ideas. Kleinhenz also said that it’s hard to dislike someone who makes you laugh. I understand that!

Wallace then moved onto a subject dear to my heart – the issue of the archives. Were they rich, she asked. Did they change Kleinhenz’s view? Kleinhenz, laughing, started by comparing Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s ordered 8-box collection with Germaine’s nearly 500 boxes that were not organised chronologically. She discussed her process – the role Wallace had played in her getting “more organised”, and how she handled the closing of the Greer archives for 12 months partway through her research. This turned out to be useful, because during this time she went to secondary sources and conducted interviews, so that when the archives opened again, she had a framework.

She shared some of the treasures, some of the things that stood out – such as letters from Clive James, Helen Garner, and a French girl who told a very personal story and to whom Greer wrote a personally revealing reply.

During the Q&A at the end, the issue of Greer keeping copies of the letters she wrote came up. Why did she – do some – people keep not only the letters they receive but copies of those they write? There’s no single answer of course. However, Kleinhenz did say that she believes Greer knows her “commercial” value. The words “no fee, no work” appear at the bottom of many of her letters. Wallace interjected here commenting that writers’ incomes are “lumpy”, so it’s quite likely that potential financial value drove her decision to keep her papers – and, Greer knew she was big. (However, it could also simply that she’s a hoarder, or, a historian who likes to keep her records? I can understand that.)

Kleinhenz also said that she suspects that Greer had probably removed some family-related material from the archives before she sold them. Also, there was not much “childhood stuff” in the archives, but the audio material is wonderful. Greer apparently records her thoughts, for example, as she goes for walks with her dogs.

Q & A

I’ve included some of the Q&A discussions above, because it seemed logical, but other issues were discussed, including:

  • Why did she choose Greer? Kleinhenz said she grew up with Greer. Greer is only three years older than she, but also lived in the same area of Melbourne, and they both went to Catholic schools. However, the main reason is that she felt Greer deserved it: she wanted, she reiterated, “to put record straight”.
  • What difference do her archives make to assessment of her? Kleinhenz answered that while they don’t contain much in terms of signficant new facts, they add a depth of understanding. Those letters she mentioned above, and other letters like those with John Atwood, whom she appeared to love at one stage in her life, helped here.
  • What impact did the birth control pill have? Kleinhenz said that Greer was highly aware of the pill and felt that women needed to think through the changes the pill brought, and how they would manage those changes, what they would do with them. This came out in the excellent notes she made for writing The female eunuch.

Kleinhenz added at this point, that Greer had felt a freak as a young person – she felt too tall, too noisy.

Closing the session

In closing the session, Colin Steele referred to the small Trailblazers book – accompanying Australia Post’s Australian Legends series – in which Greer says she’s not a tour operator, but wants to encourage people to think for themselves. This, in fact, perfectly sums up my attitude to Greer. She’s a bit (hmm, just a bit?!) of an iconoclast. I don’t always like – or perhaps, fully comprehend – what she says, but I love that she’s around saying it. She can always make me think – and sometimes, she makes me laugh!

I’d love to say more about Greer and some of the ideas generated by this conversation, but will, perhaps save them until I’ve read the biography.

Podcast: click this link to see if you think I’ve captured the conversation accurately enough!

ANU/The Canberra Times Meet the Author
MC: Colin Steele
Australian National University
30 October 2018

Nadia Wheatley in conversation with Marion Halligan

/ Whispering Gums / 20 Comments

Nadia Wheatley, Marion Halligan,

Nadia Wheatley and Marion Halligan, ANU Meet the Author

Nadia Wheatley is, I fear, not as well-known in Australia’s literary firmament as she should be because her credentials are excellent. Not only is there My place (1987) – a wonderful multi-award-winning children’s book about the history of place – but her biography of Charmian Clift, The life and myth of Charmian Clift, has been described by critic Peter Craven as “one of the greatest Australian biographies.” She has appeared here in a Monday Musings list of books recommended by indigenous writers (even though she is not indigenous) for her book, with Ken Searle, The Papunya School book of country and history. And these are just a few of her literary credentials.

All this is to say that when I saw that she was to be a “Meet the author” subject this week at the ANU – on a free night for me, no less – I didn’t hesitate to book. It didn’t hurt, too, that her Conversation partner was to be Marion Halligan (who has appeared here several times, in various guises.)

Now, I don’t want to discuss in detail her latest book – Her mother’s daughter: A memoir – which was the reason for this event, because I have almost finished it and will discuss it in my soon-to-come post, so I’ll just share, briefly, some of the main points from the conversation.

“Caught between an independent woman and a controlling man”

The book’s title suggests that the book is Wheatley’s memoir of her life with her mother (Nina, familiarly called Neen.) However, this is only part of the story. The book is, in fact, like a few I’ve read recently, a sort of hybrid biography-memoir, because it is as much a biography of her mother, who died in 1958 when Nadia was 9, as it is a memoir. Three others I’ve discussed here in recent years are Susan Varga’s Heddy and me, Anna Rosner Blay’s Sister, sister, and Halina Rubin’s Journeys with my mother. Interestingly, the mothers in all of these books experienced World War 2 in some way, though Wheatley’s mother differs from the other three European-born women in that she was an Australian who went over to work in the war.

Marion Halligan commenced the conversation by commenting that the book was a difficult read, and that it must also have been difficult to write. Wheatley agreed, commenting that people under-estimate children’s ability to suffer, but also their ability to survive…

… and both suffer and survive, Wheatley did. She was caught, she said, “between an independent woman and a controlling man”, but that was only the half of it. She wasn’t helped by a family which – only partly because it was the 1950s – did not feel the need to tell Wheatley what had really happened to her mother, resulting in the young Nadia hoping (if not totally believing), for some years, that one day her mother would return. She was abandoned by her father, whom she described as “a strange, sadistic person.” The family dynamics are complex, and I’ll discuss some of them a little more in my post on the book.

I will say, however, that the underlying biographer’s question for Nadia in writing the book was:

Why would a nice person like Neen marry an awful person like my father?

Because, awful he was … though not, it seems, to Neen in the early years of their relationship when they were working for/with refugees and displaced persons in post-war Europe!

What lifts this book above what could so easily have been a misery memoir is that it also works as social history of an era – of life in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century, and of the work Australian nurses did during and after the Second World War. The pictures Wheatley draws of the joys (yes) and challenges of the War for Nina are vivid, and ring true. Nina was a truly independent woman, despite the demands home and family exerted on unmarried “girls” at the time. The pictures Wheatley then draws of Nina post-marriage are, consequently, even more devastating – because of the gap between what could (should) have been and what was. Nina’s dire situation was compounded by the confluence of a controlling, sadistic husband and a time, the 1950s, when women had little agency in the face of such a situation. Even so, Nina did her best …

At one point during the conversation, Wheatley made the interesting – and obvious, if you know their stories – point that there are some parallels between her and her mother’s stories. Both were motherless from a young age, and both became involved in social justice action. There was discussion in fact about how her mother’s work with refugees is relevant to today’s refugee situation. Nina worked for the short-lived UNRRA and was involved in the early definition of just what a refugee is and in the practice of placing them.

Telling the story

Nadia Wheatley, Her mother's daughterIn the Q&A, I asked Wheatley about the structure she chose to use in the book, about the fact that while is it generally chronological, she inserts herself into this chronology at times when she herself wouldn’t have been alive. For example, she describes the young Nadia asking her mother about a photo in an album. This enables us to see Nadia’s interest in her mother’s story, her reaction to her mother’s story, and her mother’s later reaction to the events in her life, at least in terms of how she wants to present them to Nadia. From the reader’s point of view, it makes reading this book far more engaging.

Wheatley answered that felt she needed to be in there “on the quest”, and referred us to AJA Simon’s biography A quest for Corvo: An experiment in biography, as one of her inspirations. She wanted the book to be her journey of discovery – “to have the detective story of her unravelling her mother’s story” – rather than just be a presentation of the evidence. Again, I will talk more about this in my post, but Wheatley did share some of the stories about how she went about this unravelling. I like this approach to non-fiction, not only because it’s usually engaging, but because it can strengthen the authority or integrity of the work.

There was more to the conversation – but some of it, as I’ve already said, will come out in my post, and some of it is best left for you to read yourselves in the book. I mustn’t give it all away!

Vote of thanks

To conclude, MC Colin Steele introduced The Canberra Times’ past – and, distressingly, to date, last – literary editor, Gia Metherell, to give the vote of thanks. In doing so, she said that Wheatley’s book shows why childhood biographies can be so potent. She quoted the late Australian critic Geraldine Pascall* (I think) who said that Australian writers write more often and more potently about their childhood than anyone else, besides English and French writers. What an interesting thought on which to end a thoroughly engaging conversation.

* Gia Metherell clarifies this in the comments below saying that it wasn’t Geraldine Pascall to whom she was referring but English academic Roy Pascal. However, on checking later, she realised she had misremembered and it was Richard Coe, in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Australian: Childhood, Literature and Myth”, Southerly, 41, no. 2, 1981. Thanks Gia.

ANU/The Canberra Times Meet the Author
MC: Colin Steele
Australian National University
8 October 2018

Robyn Cadwallader in conversation with Catherine Milne

/ Whispering Gums / 21 Comments

It’s some time since I last attended an author event, not because there haven’t been any but because they’ve clashed with other commitments. I mean, why do organisations choose the same day of the week for events, like, say, Thursdays? Why don’t they get together and agree to share them across all the week days? (Hmm, then they’d only clash with something else, so let’s just recognise that life is busy, that we have too many options, and move on …)

Robyn Cadwallader, The book of colours

Anyhoo … it so happened that our regular Thursday activity was off this week, as was our occasional one that bumps the regular one, so we were free to attend the In Conversation event with local author Robyn Cadwallader. You have met Cadwallader here before: I’ve reviewed her debut novel, The anchoress, and have reported on another event with her when she conversed with Irma Gold. Now, with her second novel, Book of colours, having been published, she’s doing the rounds again, as authors do.

Book of colours is also historical fiction set in mediaeval England, but in the 1320s, some 70 years after The anchoress. Introducing Cadwallader, HarperCollins publisher Catherine Milne commented that in contrast to The anchoress’ small, cramped setting, Book of colours encompasses the world, or, at least, London and Paternoster Row. Its subject is the creation of illuminated books, in particular those little books of hours owned by women; its characters include Mathilda who commissions such a book, and its creators, John Dancaster, his wife Gemma, and a man called Will. (I think that’s right; I haven’t read the book yet.)

The conversation focused on two broad (and obvious) issues – the research and the book itself. So let’s start with the research …

Exploring a gap, a fault-line

Milne began by asking Cadwallader to read from her book, something she did a few times throughout the hour. Milne and Cadwallader then discussed the period. It was a turbulent, often violent, time for London, for England in fact. There’d been famine, the inept King Edward II was on the throne, and tension was rising (though it would be another 60 years before the Peasants’ Revolt).

Howard Psalter and Hours (British Library, Arundel 83 I), 1310-20. Public Domain

Cadwallader explained that her inspiration for the novel was her interest in books of hours, and particularly in the strange marginalia that many have. This marginalia often depicts weird creatures, and scenes telling stories, some of them rather bawdy. Sometimes they support/illustrate the content, but sometimes they seem to do the opposite, representing, for example, the wages of sin. These stories told via the illuminations, she said, can operate at different levels. What was behind this practice? No-one knows apparently, so here was her gap, her fault-line to explore.

Cadwallader’s research included:

  • lots of reading, about London, about illumination and art, of court rolls and proceedings, about privies and prostitutes. You name it, she probably read it.
  • walking London with a 14th century map, trying to capture what the place was like.
  • talking to an art historian who told her about identifying the different artists working on a particular book of hours …
  • and spending time with that book of hours until the different artists became apparent to her.

Gradually, she said, she began to see the four different people working on this book and by the time she’d finished looking at it she had a sense of her characters.

Milne then told us that in Book of colours, Cadwallader had written a book-in-a-book. Called “The art of illumination”, it’s written, I think I’m right, by Gemma. Excerpts from this preface many chapters. Milne asked Cadwallader to read one of these, and I’ll share a bit here. It starts by stating that the words must be in an order, in lines, to facilitate reading,

But the requirements of decoration are not so simple. The page needs shape and order, but not so much order that life withers. Consider the beauty of the curve and curl. And, as with a breathing city, let all of life be there in the book, from high to low, animal to monster, story and joke, devotion and dance, for God the Artisan made it all. On some pages, simple vines and flowers may be enough. On others let decoration be lush and bountiful.

“Animal to monster” took us to gargoyles and another reading of a vivid scene in which Will, looking at gargoyles, senses one coming to life … he represents Will’s secret, his shame, said Cadwallader, who loves gargoyles. (Don’t we all?)

Challenging the centre …

Moving on to the core of the book, its meaning, Cadwallader said something interesting about marginalia. It’s on the edge she said, a bit like shadows. Because of this position, it challenges the centre, but in so doing it makes the centre more real. I liked this. She said that there’s something about pictures and stories. They refuse to be bound by convention. They – their meaning, their impact – change depending on the reader, or viewer.

Milne then asked about the main theme of the book. It’s a novel about power, she said, of which women have little. How do they wield what they have?

Cadwallader responded, as she also did about The anchoress if I remember correctly, that she’s interested in ordinary women. Gemma and Mathilda (despite the latter’s privilege) are ordinary women. How do they manage the second-class roles they are assigned by their society? Illuminators, for example, like Gemma, worked alongside their husbands but were never recognised by the guilds, while women like Mathilda have more privilege but are controlled by their husbands. In fact, she has less freedom than Gemma.

Cadwallader is interested in how these women dealt with what they were given, “in how they managed to find value in their lives within the constraints.” Laughingly, she said she’s impressed with the gains her characters managed to make!! She spoke briefly about ensuring these gains, their achievements, are real, that is, believable for the time. She feels, she said, knowledgeable enough about mediaeval times, in which she has a PhD, to be able to strike the right balance. During the Q&A, Cadwallader reiterated this point, and said that she was determined not to “damage the women of the era by presenting them differently from what they are”.

That the audience was enthused by the conversation was evident in the wide variety of questions which concluded the event. The topics included the ownership of books of hours, the education of women, the writing process, and the fact that, for all its historical research, the novel contains a “ripping yarn”! I’m always interested in the writing process, and enjoyed Cadwallader’s answer to a question about Will. She said she was able to “find” him by writing a scene with him, that she discovered more about him as the action developed. For Cadwallader, as for many authors I think, their characters are, in a sense, living, changing beings.

The final reading was another excerpt from “The art of illumination”, near the end of the novel. It concluded with:

All you can do is paint faithfully and well, let the book go.

And so Cadwallader has done. I look forward to reading it and sharing my thoughts with you in the near-ish future.

ANU/The Canberra Times Meet the Author
MC: Colin Steele
Australian National University
26 April 2018

Sarah Waters in conversation with Marion Halligan

/ Whispering Gums / Leave a comment
Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters, 2006 (Courtesy: Annie_C_2, via Wikipedia, under Creative Commons CC-BY-2.0)

In a delightful coincidence, Sarah Waters was in town tonight for a literary event, just one night after my reading group discussed her novel The little stranger – and so, naturally, those of us who were free turned up to hear her converse with Canberra novelist and literati, Marion Halligan.

It can be very special hearing one novelist interview another – and this was one of those occasions. Marion and Sarah appeared very comfortable together, respectful of each other’s skills, and Sarah was generous and open in her answers – except when it came to the ending of The little stranger! All she said on THAT score was that she left it deliberately open but that she tried to lead the reader to a certain conclusion. She’s been fascinated, she said, by the discussions that have ensued about the ending. Don’t we know it!

That said, she did share some things about The little stranger, and these may or may not throw light on the mystery! Its subject is of course class, and the changes that were occurring in post-war England. She said that her original plan was to use Dr Faraday as a straightforward, transparent narrator, someone who was firmly in the middle class and a friend of the family, and who would chronicle their decline. But as she started writing, she decided to make him more uncomfortable class-wise with some lingering class resentments. A little later, she talked about poltergeists and how they represent the release of unresolved tensions, conflicts and frustrations. Hmmm … if we accept poltergeists, then I think we have to see that more than one “person” is implicated in what happened at Hundreds Hall.

Some interesting issues were raised during question time. I’ll just dot-point the ones that grabbed me in particular:

  • Echoes of and homages to other works. Waters said that she does a lot of research for her novels and that that research includes reading fiction of the era she’s researching. It’s not surprising then, she said, if people see echoes of works like Brideshead revisited, The yellow wallpaper, Rebecca and The fall of the House of Usher in this novel. She doesn’t mind people seeing these in her work.
  • Genre. She was asked how the demands of genre shape her work, and her response was that she likes to see how you can both bend genre and surrender to it at the same time.  You can certainly see her doing that in The little stranger in the way it takes the conventions of the ghost story and yet does not resolve it in any way that you could call traditional.
  • Setting a novel overseas. For some reason, someone asked whether she would ever consider setting a novel outside of England. Her flippant response was that she thought she did well to move The little stranger from her usual London to Warwickshire!  But, then she answered seriously, and I found her response interesting. She didn’t give us that old chestnut about “writing what you know”. Rather, she said she likes “to have dialogues with the traditions of British fiction”. Good for her; she has a PhD in English literature and is clearly imbued with its traditions. The Roger Federer of the literary world perhaps?

Interspersed throughout the hour were some light-hearted interactions between Sarah and Marion. One concerned the fact that Sarah writes historical novels while Marion focuses on contemporary subjects. Marion said she admired all the research Sarah does, and suggested that lazy people write in the present. Sarah quickly rejoined that writing in the present is terrifying. Where, she said, is the security of the research. Vive la différence, I say!

There was more, as you can imagine, but that is the gist of it…except of course to boast that I do now have my very own signed copy of The little stranger.

ANU/The Canberra Times Meet the Author