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Georgiana: A Biography of Georgiana McCrae, Painter, Diarist, Pioneer
After a childhood among artists, French émigrés and English radicals in Regency London, Georgiana lived as a young woman at her father's castle in the Highlands.
A gifted portraitist, professionally trained in London, she earned her own living in Edinburgh before making the choice between marriage and a career. After marrying Andrew McCrae in 1830 she followed her husband in his erratic progress from Edinburgh to London and then to Port Phillip, where he was successively lawyer, squatter and goldfields magistrate. The varied fortunes of the McCraes are recounted in a story whose tragic elements are counter-balanced by the strength of mind, the lively wit and creativity of Georgiana.
By allowing Georgiana's own voice to be heard through her letters and journals Brenda Niall has brought a legendary colonial figure into authentic vibrant life.
A gifted portraitist, professionally trained in London, she earned her own living in Edinburgh before making the choice between marriage and a career. After marrying Andrew McCrae in 1830 she followed her husband in his erratic progress from Edinburgh to London and then to Port Phillip, where he was successively lawyer, squatter and goldfields magistrate. The varied fortunes of the McCraes are recounted in a story whose tragic elements are counter-balanced by the strength of mind, the lively wit and creativity of Georgiana.
By allowing Georgiana's own voice to be heard through her letters and journals Brenda Niall has brought a legendary colonial figure into authentic vibrant life.
362 pages, Paperback
First published April 28, 1995
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About the author
Brenda Niall
25 books7 followersBrenda Niall is one of Australia’s foremost biographers. She is the author of several award-winning biographies, including her acclaimed accounts of the Boyd family and her portrait of the Durack sisters, True North. In 2016 she won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal and the National Biography Award for Mannix. In 2004 she was awarded the Order of Australia for ‘services to Australian literature, as an academic, biographer and literary critic’.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 3, 2018
Brenda Niall's 1994 biography of the cosmopolitan artist Georgiana McCrae, the illegitimate daughter of an English Duke and an unwilling pioneer of primitive Melbourne, Australia in the 1840s, was once hugely popular among book clubs in Melbourne. Accordingly, I was interested to meet Brenda at the last Melbourne Writers Festival and contrast her approach with my own.
Georgiana’s diaries and letters and family memorabilia enabled her biograher to meet the challenge of evoking ‘the drama of personality' (Brenda's words). My own books about the convict settlers of earliest colonial Australia are set in the period fifty years before Georgiana's arrival in Melbourne. The challenge to discern any kind of personality was much greater because the subjects left virtually no personal records.
However, the silences in official records helped a great deal with my efforts to draw inferences. With administrative records for convicts remaining so well-preserved in the archives, no news was often good news.
By contrast, no news was bad news for Brenda, as she tried to interpret Georgiana's silences about the nature of her marriage to Andrew McCrae. This gap in Georgiana's extensive writings is a constant theme of Brenda's book, somewhat thwarting her quest to gain a full understanding of Georgiana. This was the Holy Grail for Brenda - finding written evidence of Georgiana's attitude to her husband Andrew, and his attitude to her. Brenda was disappointed to find so little.
I concluded that Brenda and I share much in common - the thrill of the chase, the drive to find those elusive clues to life experiences and character.
Georgiana’s diaries and letters and family memorabilia enabled her biograher to meet the challenge of evoking ‘the drama of personality' (Brenda's words). My own books about the convict settlers of earliest colonial Australia are set in the period fifty years before Georgiana's arrival in Melbourne. The challenge to discern any kind of personality was much greater because the subjects left virtually no personal records.
However, the silences in official records helped a great deal with my efforts to draw inferences. With administrative records for convicts remaining so well-preserved in the archives, no news was often good news.
By contrast, no news was bad news for Brenda, as she tried to interpret Georgiana's silences about the nature of her marriage to Andrew McCrae. This gap in Georgiana's extensive writings is a constant theme of Brenda's book, somewhat thwarting her quest to gain a full understanding of Georgiana. This was the Holy Grail for Brenda - finding written evidence of Georgiana's attitude to her husband Andrew, and his attitude to her. Brenda was disappointed to find so little.
I concluded that Brenda and I share much in common - the thrill of the chase, the drive to find those elusive clues to life experiences and character.
December 19, 2020
Even Brenda Niall couldn't make me warm to Georgiana McCrae
https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/04/02/g...
https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/04/02/g...
June 28, 2012
Given that my mother was just about to call me Georgiana, after Georgiana McCrae, before dad intervened and imposed the biblical "Sarah" upon me, I enjoyed visiting McCrae homestead a couple of weeks ago, and then immediately after reading this biography. It would appear that the diaries which are in the State librray have been very selectively edited, with no overt critisism of the absent Andrew and no substantial analylis by the biographer, of his apparent desertion of the family in McCrae in enormously difficult circumstances with Georgiana (unsupported) having the sole care of so many children, and no way of Georgiana being able to pursue her own passions-her art, or making a living from her art as she was able to do in Scotland. What gorgeous descriptions of the surrounding landscape, social relations and art.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews