Exiles At Home: Australian Women Writers, 1925 1945

by Drusilla Modjeska

At the end of the 1920s, Christina Stead had left Australia and was poised to write "Seven Poor Men of Sydney". In London, Miles Franklin was producing her first "Brent of Bin Bin" book and would soon return to Australia. Katherine Susannah Pritchard was enlarging her view of black and white in outback Australia, and the team writing under the name M. Barnard. Eldershaw had published its first novel and won the Bulletin prize. Gathering these writers into a network by her support and criticism was the influential Nettie Palmer. In the mid-1930s, these women and other writers such as Eleanor Dark, Jean Devanny, Dymphna Cusack and Betty Roland, faced the impact of fascism and another war. The platform and the writing desk had different and often conflicting appeals; and the Depression underlined the already precarious existence of the woman writer. This text traces the lives of a generation of Australia's women writers through letters, diaries, notebooks, and the memories of their contemporaries.

Genres: Australia, Nonfiction

283 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Drusilla Modjeska was born in England and lived in Papua New Guinea before arriving in Australia in 1971. She studied at the Australian National University and the University of New South Wales completing a PhD which was published as Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925-1945 (1981).

Modjeska's writing often explores the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. The best known of her work are Poppy (1990), a fictionalised biography of her mother, and Stravinsky's Lunch (2001), a feminist reappraisal of the lives and work of Australian painters Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith. She has also edited several volumes of stories, poems and essays, including the work of Lesbia Harford and a 'Focus on Papua New Guinea' issue for the literary magazine Meanjin.

In 2006 she was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, "investigating the interplay of race, gender and the arts in post-colonial Papua New Guinea".

Reviews

[Ms_prue · Rating 5 out of 5]

So it turns out this book was supremely relevant to many of my interests - women, writing, communism (in Australia; before and during Stalin), free love, feminism, the tension between career and domestic/familial obligation, class, etc etc. For a person who believed herself very unimpressed and disinterested in Australian literature I sure am very interested in Australian literature all of a sudden, and it's the direct result of reading this book. Anyway, now I have a reading list a million miles long and an urge to read people's PhD theses on similar topics. Maybe even make a trip to the Mitchell Library and read the uncensored version of T&T&T. Lynn you would need to be a part of this reading trip too!

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Exiles at Home was one of those books that was prominent in the 1980s, but although I read iconic feminist texts like The Female Eunuch, The Feminine Mystique, and The Second Sex, and almost all the novels I read in the 1980s were by women, I never got round to reading this survey of Australian women writers in the interwar period.  What prompted me to buy a Kindle edition now, (for the princely sum of $AUD3.99!) was my reading of Eleanor Dark's 1934 Prelude to Christopher. I wanted to know more about its place in the history of modernist literature in Australia.

Alas, while Exiles at Home is interesting enough, it didn't help much with that.  Modjeska, IMO, misrepresented Dark's novel as dealing with ‘women’s experience’, because it focussed on maternity and the psychology of motherhood (Loc 4458).  Though I'm prepared to concede that perhaps today's greater awareness of mental health has influenced my opinion, I don't think that was the novel's major focus at all.  As you can see in my review, I thought that Dark was primarily interested in how the mental health of her central character was always under question (because she was a woman who had been gaslighted) yet the collective madness of WW1 and the hysteria that surrounded it, was never questioned.

Exiles at Home is, as Judy Turner wrote in the first paragraph of her (paywalled) 1982 review for the ABR, primarily a political history of women's writing in the 1920s and 1930s.  It barely mentions the literary qualities of these women's writing, because Modjeska was interested in feminist politics rather than literary developments.  It ascribes the biggest influence on these writers to the conservative, nationalist Australian critic Nettie Palmer.

Exiles at Home is a fascinating work by a feminist of the 1970s about a group of anti-fascist feminists of the 1920s and 1930s. From it we learn as much about the world view of the author as we do about the politics of its subjects. A serious book, about serious writers, it examines novels for their historical rather than for their literary interest. It offers no real criticism of writing styles, and no comparison with modern feminist authors. Nor is it a book to be read in the hope of rediscovering almost forgotten characters from our literary past.

Perhaps like Judy Turner whose words imply discontent, I  wanted this book to be more than it was. I wanted literary criticism of women writers which certainly at the time was in short supply if the reference books I have are anything to go by.  But what Modjeska delivers instead is an assertion of the significance of women writers in the interwar years.  Which makes it all the more obvious that the token literary criticism there that there was, had failed to grasp a significant literary movement.  She interrogates women's fiction to see if they were writing about political issues that affect women rather than just the 'domestic' issues that marginalised women's fiction for so long.  Part of that was redefining what 'domestic' issues are...

[Would anyone today suggest that Eleanor Dark's exposure of the way women experienced mental health services in Prelude to Christopher, was a 'domestic issue'?]

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/02/01/e...

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hunted this book down after the first Stella Prize award ceremony, where Kerryn Goldsworthy cited Drusilla Modjeska as one 'whose work from the 1970s onwards helped to enable and develop the depth of talent that we now see in Australian women's writing.' This book is a history of Australian writing in the 1930s, when women were dominant in the field of novels. The importance of this book is nicely summed up by Modjeska in the final chapter:

The women of the thirties, however, as we are today, were facing serious issues: fascism and the failure of liberal democracy, the nature of socialism, the impact of suburbanism. ... [The protest of these women writers] is part of our history that should be recognised, acknowledged and understood not only by historians, critics and teachers, but by people working in cultural movements. What these women were trying to do was important. ... It is important too for Australian writing as it is developing today that women writers take themselves and their history seriously, and with pride.

The greatest strengths of this book are the way it brings to life the varying constraints placed upon these different women, and the way that the women came together through correspondence to find support. The figure of the critic Nettie Palmer is particularly important here, as Australia's pre-eminent critic of the time, and as a prolific letter-writer and keen networker.

Yet I couldn't recommend this book to a general reader. It is clearly a revised thesis and shows many of the hallmarks of academic writing, in particular a frustrating sign-posting of where the book is going, where it's been, and where it is. As Modjeska writes rigidly to a thematic schema, the chronology of the period is broken, and thus to some extent her subjects are lost. Well-known historical events are sometimes explained at length while obscure (though presumably not to the history department and Modjeska) events are passed over without comment. The biggest flaw is the lack of engagement with the actual writing the women did.

[Abbey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I skim read this for my thesis and was focusing on particular authors, and it was definitely useful and accurate to my knowledge, well-written, and gives some life to the women, so points for that. I think this came out of a thesis on Eleanor Dark, and I almost wish she had kept it to that or just selected one-three other women of her generation/lifestyle, because I felt like I was constantly jumping across time periods and personalities - and some of the conclusions made couldn't apply to all the women because of their difference lives, writing styles, and areas of focus. This also means that we don't get complete, human pictures of the women themselves, because there simply isn't space and this is obviously derived from a highly academic piece of work.
The literary analysis was patchy but not the focus of the book, which is fine, but then occasionally it appears in force which can be a little jarring. Some of the conclusions or assumptions Modjeska makes are definitely her own projections onto the individuals, which is something I totally think is fine in historical writing, but maybe needs to be signposted as your opinion, especially if not based on any particular primary sources. Herein lies the tension between historical writing and literary analysis - both are subjective, but the latter is even more so.
Perhaps also because when Modjeska wrote this, it was part of the 'rescuing women forgotten to history' genre of feminist history, and I don't feel super connected to this as someone who has read quite a lot of it and for whom many of these women are not forgotten. I would probably recommend just reading the books of these authors nowadays, and using this for context if that's something you're really into.

[Glenn Blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was written as a thesis, and contains specific information I've not read elsewhere. It is very heavily focused on politics, which although essential to understanding the climate in which the women writers were involved in the 1930's, is not a subject i like to get involved in. But my personal likes and dislikes should not at all detract from the extremely well researched and collated nature of this book.

[Alistair · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating account of early twentieth century Australian women writers, including Christina Stead, Miles Franklin, Eleanor Dark, Katherine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Betty Roland, Nettie Palmer and more. Absorbing stuff.