This chapter examines how women’s writing has shaped the Australian novel. It suggests that the novel and women’s particular contributions to the form serve as significant flashpoints for discussions over the directions of the national culture. The chapter proceeds from the knowledge of Aileen Moreton-Robinson, an Indigenous woman of the Goenpul tribe, part of the Quandamooka nation: namely, that speaking about ‘women’ as though their presumed shared identities, experiences and representations ‘as Australians’ hinged on gender alone, has been a significant faultline in non-indigenous feminisms. Further, writings by Indigenous women underscore that ‘the novel’ is a freighted form that turns critical attention to the many strategies historically practised in Indigenous cultures and communities, that unsettle any presumption that ‘the novel’ (and indeed ‘the nation’) is a category or genre to be taken for granted. This chapter seeks to come to an understanding of how women’s novel writing in Australia is therefore a category of reception with complex histories and effects. It has a particular interest in the production and reception of ‘women’s novel writing’ in terms of the practices of individual authors; the creation of cultural and literary fields; complications of gendered identities; and the construction of readerships.

The presence of the Catholic Church and the imposition of religious beliefs and practices onto the newly found inhabitants of the Americas was perhaps one of the biggest catalysts of transition during the early modern period. This chapter focuses on the literature that was produced for, and by indigenous peoples within the religious realm. It considers different discursive genres that are emblematic of the transitions that natives experienced when they were into close and sustained contact with religious institutions, such as plays for conversion and evangelization, sermons, catechisms, spiritual biographies, and other prescriptive literature.

This chapter examines how a U.S. soldier’s sexual harassment prompted the enrollment of Kā tý Brown, also known as Catharine Brown, at a mission school in the Cherokee Nation in 1817. Viewed through Indigenous feminists’ theorizations of the role of sexual violence in settler colonialism, archival materials enable new understandings of the significance of the life and writings of Brown, one of the earliest Native American women to publish self-authored writings. Brown’s strategic and agential removal of herself from her harasser’s proximity became a foundational act in her development as a Cherokee leader over the next several years as she put her literacy to service in the cause of sovereignty. More broadly, the essay interrogates how a lack of scholarly attention to Indigenous women’s experiences of sexual violence has affected scholarly conclusions about Cherokee-white relations in the pre-Removal period and demonstrates how Indigenous feminist theorizations of colonial sexual violence must be put in dialogue with the documentary record in archives.

Indigenous women carry forward intergenerational histories of transmuting trauma into what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson calls “a gorgeous generative refusal of colonial recognition.” Drawing on methodologies by Indigenous scholars Dian Million, Daniel Justice, Leanne Simpson and Audra Simpson, this essay traces an intergenerational literary praxis that highlights models of critical kinship, felt theory, and refusals. More specifically, Indigenous relational frameworks bring greater visibility to intergenerational connections linking diverse Indigenous women writers and artists over a nearly two-hundred-year span. Such connections honor the power of intergenerational memory to confront and resist settler sexual and gender violence. Across a range of creative and critical expression, generations of Native women writers--both those well-known today in the US literary canon and others less visible--refuse and redirect violence to human and more-than-human kin, to lands, and to knowledges. At the same time, their persistent acts of intergenerational witness, memory, and story-sharing imagine alternative Indigenous futures.

From the eighteenth century, Indigenous women have produced texts in English that reflect and re-inscribe Indigenous principles of law and social order, as well as challenge the force of settler colonial law. Native women writers have made visible the burdens and structures of violence that make Indigenous women and children particularly vulnerable to state disciplinary power (such as public execution, military warfare, massacres, state-sanctioned starvation, and the removal of indigenous children from their families) and extra-judicial violence (land theft, fraud, murder, rape). This essay reviews major works and criticism, organized in three overlapping categories: writing about the law and criminality; writing about prison and carcerality; and writing Indigenous law. These writers mastered new languages and genres to assert Native rights and make legible multiple forms of violence against Native communities. Across time and circumstance, Native women’s writing has had very little distance from the law, or from the law’s claim over their bodies, families, and futures.

This chapter argues that Arthur Murphy’s tragic dramaturgy is more radical than has been recognised, notably in its treatment of the classic Enlightenment concerns with religious toleration and the ‘savage’ or indigenous critique of colonial invasion. Murphy’s serious plays are Drydenic in spatial reach, stretching from East Asia (The Orphan of China [1759]) to Peru (Alzuma [1757/1773]) via Syria (Zenobia [1768]) and Greece (The Grecian Daughter [1772]). Murphy’s imperial dramaturgy swerves from his predecessor’s, however, in focusing on female protagonists and reiterating indigenous or non-European literary historical accounts of colonial conquest and resistance. Contextualising Murphy’s tragic writing via his Irish and Catholic origins (partially subsumed by his later metropolitan British and Anglican affiliations), this chapter explores Alzuma’s reiteration of Voltaire’s and Hill’s Alzire/Alzuma, themselves redactions of Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of Peru. Noting how Murphy’s profound attachment to his devoutly Catholic mother informs his critique of forced conversion, Orr shows how his dramatisation of the black legend topos is linked to other Irish Patriot uses of this trope, by radical politician Charles Lucas and by well-known Patriot author Henry Brooke, in the latter’s Montezuma [undated].

Macklin’s Henry the VII (1746) has received little critical attention. This chapter reads the play as part of a tradition of Irish history plays that were influenced by Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713). Addison’s themes of personal self-sacrifice, love of country and resistance to tyranny proved inspirational for Irish dramatists in the wake of the Declaratory Act (1720) as can be seen in William Philips’s Hibernia Freed (1722) and Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa (1739). History plays then might offer an alternative genealogy of eighteenth-century Irish theatre which is often focused on comedies.