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BIOGRAPHY Between sprung rhythm and weird melancholy Laurie Hergenhan, Ken Stewart, and Michael Wilding, eds. Cyril Hopkins' Marcus Clarke: Edited From a Manuscript at the Mitchell Library. North Melbourne, Vic: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009. xlvii + 339 pp. A$39.95. ISBN 9781921509124.
A generation ago, nineteenth century Australian literature was almost invisible to the world. That this has changed is due to the convergence of several factors: Australians are no longer so bound to teleological narratives of nationalist emergence and do not feel the need to play down the links to Britain that their nineteenthcentury literature inevitable raises. The convict legacy, and the treatment of the indigenous people are two aspects that inevitably come up, explicitly or tacitly, in literature of this era, and they come up as history, raw and uncensored, would have them, not as contemporary rewritings designed to please a literary constituency would make them. Victorian studies - studies of British Victorian texts - has grown notably more interested in colonialism, and globalization, as well as in the study of formerly noncanonical and nonliterary texts. Finally, there s a certain tolerance of the rough, the inchoate, the un-hewn, a liberation from the strictures of the pièce bien fait, that render us able to see the discursivity of these texts without perpetually being disappointed that the authors did not write in the manner of Conrad or Gide or Flannery O'Connor.
With all this, though, and with all the flourishing of not only Australianist but global Victorianist studies of Victorian Australia - Janet Myer's Antipodal England (SUNY Press, 2009) being only the latest example - there still seems a gap in this material: we have not quite captured the skein of proximity and distance that wound Britain and Australia together yet kept them so vastly apart. And no better metaphor can be found for this gap than the friendship between Marcus Clarke - Australia's greatest novelist of the nineteenth century - and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the greatest lyric poet in English in the nineteenth century after the generation of Tennyson and browning. Both Clarke and Hopkins, as boys, went to Highgate Grammar School in London, where Hopkins was two years Clarke's senior. It was, indeed, Gerard's younger brother, Cyril, who was Clarke's exact contemporary, and...