Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925-1945

At the end of the 1920s, Christina Stead had left Australia and was poised to write "Seven Poor Men of Sydney". In London, Miles Franklin was producing her first "Brent of Bin Bin" book and would soon return to Australia. Katherine Susannah Pritchard was enlarging her view of black and white in outback Australia, and the team writing under the name M. Barnard. Eldershaw had published its first novel and won the Bulletin prize. Gathering these writers into a network by her support and criticism was the influential Nettie Palmer. In the mid-1930s, these women and other writers such as Eleanor Dark, Jean Devanny, Dymphna Cusack and Betty Roland, faced the impact of fascism and another war. The platform and the writing desk had different and often conflicting appeals; and the Depression underlined the already precarious existence of the woman writer. This text traces the lives of a generation of Australia's women writers through letters, diaries, notebooks, and the memories of their contemporaries.