Girl, woman, spinster—‘desire, fear, ridicule’: the feminine and the failed in twentieth-century Australian women’s writing

Abstract

This thesis presents the first complete study of twentieth-century Australian novels by women, for women, and about women. This project is biographical, historical, and literary: exploring the female subject from within both the fiction and the authors’ real lives. This is an historically specific study and will focus on texts which span the twentieth century; specifically, the decades subsequent to Australian Federation in 1901 and non-Indigenous Australian women’s suffrage in 1902. This thesis will explore the complex notion of assumed independence that accompanied these significant moments in Australian history: the independence of a newly federated nation, and, primarily, the independence of a newly liberated woman.

It was at this time, at the turn of the twentieth century, that a fantasy figure known as ‘the Australian Girl’ was promoted as being synonymous with a ‘new’ (or rather, newly federated) Australia. This study will interrogate the idealised ‘girl’—informed by white, colonial, masculinist nationalism—and where she stood in a post-suffrage Australia. The potency of the Australian Girl character type was such that she appears—in assorted guises, and with varying significance—across the novels of each of the twentieth-century women writers discussed in this thesis. These writers and their works are integral to our understanding of the gendered roles being assigned to the literary female subject—‘girl,’ ‘woman,’ spinster’—at a time when rebarbative narratives of a white and ‘youthful’ nation, and subsequently a white and youthful ‘girl’, were saturating Australian literature.

Extensive archival inquiry into the lives and literary works of the following six Australian women writers has been performed for this study: Alice Jane Muskett (1869–1936), Louise Mack (1870–1935), Mabel Forrest (1872–1935), Alice Grant Rosman (1882–1961), P. L. Travers (1899–1996), and Elizabeth Harrower (1928–2020). It is by tracing the lives mapped by these writers and their heroines—both conventional and alternative—that this thesis can demonstrate that no fate is more abject for the Australian Girl—whether literal or literary— than that of fulfilling the promise placed upon her by forces of colonialism and patriarchy.