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Slow Dawning
Slow Dawning explores the social and professional restrictions on a young woman doctor practising in a small Australian country town in the 1920s.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1932
20 people want to read
About the author
Eleanor Dark
16 books17 followersEleanor Dark (1901 - 1985) was an Australian author, most known for her historical novel The Timeless Land (1941), which became a bestseller in Australia and the USA.
Dark was born on 26 August 1901 at Croydon, Sydney, second of three children of Sydney-born parents Dowell O’Reilly, schoolteacher and author, and his wife Eleanor Grace, née McCulloch, who died in 1914 after an unhappy marriage and a period of ill health. Small, dark and elfin, 'Pixie', as she was known to her family, attended several private schools before boarding at Redlands, Neutral Bay, from 1916 to 1920.
Although Pixie had written verse from the age of 7, as the family’s finances grew tighter her hopes of university and a writing career faded. After attending Stott & Hoare’s Business College, she worked as a stenographer for a firm of solicitors, Makinson, Plunkett & d’Apice, for eighteen months. She married Eric Payten Dark, a medical practitioner and a widower with an infant son, John, on 1 February 1922 at St Matthias’s Church of England, Paddington. Eric and Eleanor shared many interests: literature, history, tennis, bushwalking, mountain-climbing and gardening. Next year they moved to Katoomba. In the relative isolation of the Blue Mountains she resumed writing. Eric enthusiastically encouraged her. They were absorbed in each other; John moved back and forth between them and his mother’s family and later boarded at Sydney Grammar School, visiting the Darks for occasional weekends. Their son Michael was born in 1929; Eleanor was a devoted mother to him.
Dark used the pseudonyms 'P. O’R.' and 'Patricia O’Rane' for the verse which she wrote in the 1920s and early 1930s. It was published in Australia by journals including the Triad, Bulletin and Woman’s Mirror, but was not very significant. Her short stories were also published in these journals and in Motoring News, Home and Ink.
She wrote her ten novels between the 1930s and 1950s. Seven had contemporary themes, often utilising the techniques of modernism, exploring contemporary relationships and politics. Her other three novels - beginning with The Timeless Land - formed an historical trilogy and were her most popular and best-selling works.
Both Eleanor and Eric were openly leftist in their views throughout a period when Australia was increasingly conservative. They were monitored by the government during the "Red scare" of the 1940s and 1950s, for fear they were members of the Communist Party (they weren't).
Dark largely abandoned writing after 1960. Although she worked on manuscript novels and plays, she lost interest due to a combination of low sales and the changing tastes of the public. In the late 1970s, Dark was awarded an Order of Australia medal, and her books were gradually republished in the 1980s as a new wave of artists and feminists discovered her writings. By this time, she was ill, and died in 1985 in hospital.
Dark was born on 26 August 1901 at Croydon, Sydney, second of three children of Sydney-born parents Dowell O’Reilly, schoolteacher and author, and his wife Eleanor Grace, née McCulloch, who died in 1914 after an unhappy marriage and a period of ill health. Small, dark and elfin, 'Pixie', as she was known to her family, attended several private schools before boarding at Redlands, Neutral Bay, from 1916 to 1920.
Although Pixie had written verse from the age of 7, as the family’s finances grew tighter her hopes of university and a writing career faded. After attending Stott & Hoare’s Business College, she worked as a stenographer for a firm of solicitors, Makinson, Plunkett & d’Apice, for eighteen months. She married Eric Payten Dark, a medical practitioner and a widower with an infant son, John, on 1 February 1922 at St Matthias’s Church of England, Paddington. Eric and Eleanor shared many interests: literature, history, tennis, bushwalking, mountain-climbing and gardening. Next year they moved to Katoomba. In the relative isolation of the Blue Mountains she resumed writing. Eric enthusiastically encouraged her. They were absorbed in each other; John moved back and forth between them and his mother’s family and later boarded at Sydney Grammar School, visiting the Darks for occasional weekends. Their son Michael was born in 1929; Eleanor was a devoted mother to him.
Dark used the pseudonyms 'P. O’R.' and 'Patricia O’Rane' for the verse which she wrote in the 1920s and early 1930s. It was published in Australia by journals including the Triad, Bulletin and Woman’s Mirror, but was not very significant. Her short stories were also published in these journals and in Motoring News, Home and Ink.
She wrote her ten novels between the 1930s and 1950s. Seven had contemporary themes, often utilising the techniques of modernism, exploring contemporary relationships and politics. Her other three novels - beginning with The Timeless Land - formed an historical trilogy and were her most popular and best-selling works.
Both Eleanor and Eric were openly leftist in their views throughout a period when Australia was increasingly conservative. They were monitored by the government during the "Red scare" of the 1940s and 1950s, for fear they were members of the Communist Party (they weren't).
Dark largely abandoned writing after 1960. Although she worked on manuscript novels and plays, she lost interest due to a combination of low sales and the changing tastes of the public. In the late 1970s, Dark was awarded an Order of Australia medal, and her books were gradually republished in the 1980s as a new wave of artists and feminists discovered her writings. By this time, she was ill, and died in 1985 in hospital.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 22, 2013
In 1924 Valerie Spencer is 25 and returns to her home town of Kawarra to set up a medical practice. The locals of course are not welcoming and she has to fight prejudices and restrictions that society imposes on her because she is a woman. I was immediately surprised by Eleanor Dark tackling the tricky subject of sex. It is raised several times through the book, in particular when Kitty, a young woman she knew as a child visits Valerie to find out what she really will face on her wedding night.
Valerie is also tempted to seek physical satisfaction with a man (who she doesn't love) simply because it looks like the career she has chosen may very well leave her unmarried her whole life.
Although there are aspects of a romantic potboiler - three men all interested in the main character (don't forget it is a small town), a storm, a car accident - the novel rises above all this. For a start I found that Valerie reacts differently to each of them and they too, are depicted as quite different men. Dark also skilfully evokes the gossips and attitudes of a small town. I particularly like her creation of Kitty's mother who cossets her daughter and tries to keep her as "pure" as possible. And then on Page 90 there is this wonderful prophetic passage:
"It was in this way that she had seen her fellow-women. They would climb at last, she dreamed, to a height where they would perform not only the artistic or intellectual work to which their natures inclined, but the normal functions of wifehood and motherhood as well - carrying a double burden as only they were privileged to carry it. A terrible fight, and a slow one, but epic in its magnificence. Generations it would take, and thousands of women would be the most bitter enemies of their own sex."
I find it intriguing that Eleanor Dark was so disparaging of her first novel calling it a potboiler and writing of it to Nettie Palmer "that it was the only time in my life when I wrote dishonestly, deliberately wrote down with the object of making money".
I really think she was being very hard on herself. Or perhaps taste has changed over the ninety years since she wrote Slow Dawning. I think also that something was lost during the time of writing the novel - 1926 to its publication in 1932. By the thirties, the ideas Dark presented would not have appeared so original. I do feel that its impact may have been much stronger if it could have been published closer to the time of writing but then perhaps those very ideas prevented that happening. There is very little information that I can find which explains the delay only that there weren't very many publishing opportunities for Australian women in the 1920s.
To me, as a reader in the 21st century the novel is not the melodrama that Dark and even her biographer, Barbara Brooks, claims it is. I found the book a wonderful barometer of the twenties. It gave me a real feel for Australia in the Twenties and it was ultimately an extremely readable book. Highly recommended. The only trouble is the book is no longer available. I have searched in vain for a copy to buy and Australian libraries only hold two copies. I had to visit the Mitchell in Sydney and photocopy the book to read it which is ridiculous for such a famous writer as Eleanor Dark. Her first novel should be available for all of us to read and enjoy!
Valerie is also tempted to seek physical satisfaction with a man (who she doesn't love) simply because it looks like the career she has chosen may very well leave her unmarried her whole life.
Although there are aspects of a romantic potboiler - three men all interested in the main character (don't forget it is a small town), a storm, a car accident - the novel rises above all this. For a start I found that Valerie reacts differently to each of them and they too, are depicted as quite different men. Dark also skilfully evokes the gossips and attitudes of a small town. I particularly like her creation of Kitty's mother who cossets her daughter and tries to keep her as "pure" as possible. And then on Page 90 there is this wonderful prophetic passage:
"It was in this way that she had seen her fellow-women. They would climb at last, she dreamed, to a height where they would perform not only the artistic or intellectual work to which their natures inclined, but the normal functions of wifehood and motherhood as well - carrying a double burden as only they were privileged to carry it. A terrible fight, and a slow one, but epic in its magnificence. Generations it would take, and thousands of women would be the most bitter enemies of their own sex."
I find it intriguing that Eleanor Dark was so disparaging of her first novel calling it a potboiler and writing of it to Nettie Palmer "that it was the only time in my life when I wrote dishonestly, deliberately wrote down with the object of making money".
I really think she was being very hard on herself. Or perhaps taste has changed over the ninety years since she wrote Slow Dawning. I think also that something was lost during the time of writing the novel - 1926 to its publication in 1932. By the thirties, the ideas Dark presented would not have appeared so original. I do feel that its impact may have been much stronger if it could have been published closer to the time of writing but then perhaps those very ideas prevented that happening. There is very little information that I can find which explains the delay only that there weren't very many publishing opportunities for Australian women in the 1920s.
To me, as a reader in the 21st century the novel is not the melodrama that Dark and even her biographer, Barbara Brooks, claims it is. I found the book a wonderful barometer of the twenties. It gave me a real feel for Australia in the Twenties and it was ultimately an extremely readable book. Highly recommended. The only trouble is the book is no longer available. I have searched in vain for a copy to buy and Australian libraries only hold two copies. I had to visit the Mitchell in Sydney and photocopy the book to read it which is ridiculous for such a famous writer as Eleanor Dark. Her first novel should be available for all of us to read and enjoy!
Displaying 1 of 1 review