Content area
Full Text
In Damned Whores and God's Police,(2) Anne Summers makes a half-page plea for the recognition and critical acceptance of Elizabeth Harrower. She also points to the links between Harrower's Emily Lawrence, in The Long Prospect,(3) and Kylie Tennant's Shannon Hicks, in Ride on Stranger, at least in terms of their careers. Summers uses Harrower as an example of a female novelist whose works have been denied critical attention in Australia and who has yet the tenacity and courage to persist in writing "her splendid books about women for a world which fails mostly even to acknowledge their existence." Summers sees a link between Emily Lawrence and Shannon Hicks consisting in their "pain and intellectual frustration of being denied books by the Philistines in whose charge" they have been placed. (pp. 49-50)
Certainly Harrower's works illustrate scathingly the anti-intellectualism of Australian society, its denigration of the intelligent woman, its insularity, parochialism and philistinism. Summers does not mention that, in the novels, both males and females suffer from this Australian malaise. I suggest also that the links between Emily Lawrence and Shannon Hicks are far more complex than their exclusion from the world of books. Harrower's works, and her portrayal of female characters and their plight within Australian society moves far beyond the examination of anti-intellectualism and has dimensions which are considerably broader than a specifically Australian society or literature.
In a recent article(4) I have commented on the notion of a female tradition of literature as explicated by Elaine Showalter(5) and other contemporary feminist critics. In that article, I argue that Miles Franklin could be seen as belonging to a tradition of literature much broader than nineteenth century Australian, and unified in themes, imagery and subject matter. This literature can be termed "Female." Although the concept of a female imagination, as proposed by Spacks(6) remains questionable, smacking as it does of biological determinism, the notion of a female sub-culture running parallel to the dominant male culture and producing its own images, themes and subject matter, is less contentious. Certainly there are uncanny resemblances between the works of many female writers, regardless of time and place. Harrower, no less than the Brontes or Tennant or Franklin, is portraying a consciousness and life-style which belongs specifically to this...