Marjorie Barnard: a re-examination of her life and work

Abstract

A wealth of scholarly works were written about Marjorie Barnard following the acclaim greeting the republication, in 1973, of The Persimmon Tree. That same year Louise E Rorabacher wrote a book-length study -Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw, after agreeing not to write about Barnard's private life. This led to many studies of the pair's joint literary output and short biographical studies and much misinformation, from scholars beguiled into believing Barnard's stories which were often deliberately disseminated to protect the secrecy of the affair that dominated her life between 1934 and 1942. A re-examination of her life and work is now necessary because there have been huge misunderstandings about other aspects of Barnard's life, too. Her habit of telling imaginary stories denigrating her father, led to him being maligned by his daughter's interviewers. Marjorie's commonest accusation was of her father's meanness, starting with her student allowance, but if the changing value of money is taken into account, her allowance (for pocket money) was extremely generous compared to wages of the time. In 1935, when Marjorie, as a middle-aged woman, gave up work to write full time, Oswald doubled her allowance and, because she never did earn enough from writing to provide her own pocket money, he kept on paying her that allowance until he died. This surely is evidence of both his generosity and his interest in helping his daughter pursue her ambitions. There is also the matter of him privately publishing her first book, a collection of her schoolgirl stories. Barnard left no diaries, and her letters and interviews were often designed to conceal. It is time that Barnard's life is shown more accurately in its setting, within a comfortable home in middle-class Sydney during a large part of the 20th century. This biography offers a fuller, more accurate, and comprehensive investigation into her life and the wide variety of her work-from novels and short stories to history and critical literary studies and political pamphlets, and also her constant efforts to have Australian writing recognised as a distinct and important part of a separate Australian culture.