10 - Women Writers and the Emerging Urban Novel, 1930–1952

Summary

In a review article for the West Australian in 1939, a literary critic known as ‘Norbar’ proclaimed that in the recent past, the ‘most outstanding of Australian novels ... have been novels of city life’. This was a welcome development, Norbar maintained, a sign that Australia had ‘ceased to be a mere colonial appendage to Europe ... and [was] rapidly becoming an expanding industrial nation of the south’. Much of this ‘outstanding’ literature was produced by women (Modjeska; Sheridan). In quick succession, Eleanor Dark, Dymphna Cusack, Kylie Tennant and M. Barnard Eldershaw published novels set in contemporary Sydney, capturing the city in a period of rapid development as it attempted to move from colonial chaos to modern rationality. In these novels, women’s position in urban space is unstably located at the nexus of participation and exclusion, reflecting the writers’ status as both insiders (as white settlers) and outsiders (as women) in the colonial-capitalist-patriarchal project of Australian urban modernity. This chapter shows how the architectonics of the novel and topography of the city interacted at a time in Australia when both forms were emerging into modernity.