ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Exiles at Home was one of those books that was prominent in the 1980s, but although I read iconic feminist texts like The Female Eunuch, The Feminine Mystique, and The Second Sex, and almost all the novels I read in the 1980s were by women, I never got round to reading this survey of Australian women writers in the interwar period.  What prompted me to buy a Kindle edition now, (for the princely sum of $AUD3.99!) was my reading of Eleanor Dark’s 1934 Prelude to Christopher. I wanted to know more about its place in the history of modernist literature in Australia.

Alas, while Exiles at Home is interesting enough, it didn’t help much with that.  Modjeska, IMO, misrepresented Dark’s novel as dealing with ‘women’s experience’, because it focussed on maternity and the psychology of motherhood (Loc 4458).  Though I’m prepared to concede that perhaps today’s greater awareness of mental health has influenced my opinion, I don’t think that was the novel’s major focus at all.  As you can see in my review, I thought that Dark was primarily interested in how the mental health of her central character was always under question (because she was a woman who had been gaslighted) yet the collective madness of WW1 and the hysteria that surrounded it, was never questioned.

Exiles at Home is, as Judy Turner wrote in the first paragraph of her (paywalled) 1982 review for the ABR, primarily a political history of women’s writing in the 1920s and 1930s.  It barely mentions the literary qualities of these women’s writing, because Modjeska was interested in feminist politics rather than literary developments.  It ascribes the biggest influence on these writers to the conservative, nationalist Australian critic Nettie Palmer.

Exiles at Home is a fascinating work by a feminist of the 1970s about a group of anti-fascist feminists of the 1920s and 1930s. From it we learn as much about the world view of the author as we do about the politics of its subjects. A serious book, about serious writers, it examines novels for their historical rather than for their literary interest. It offers no real criticism of writing styles, and no comparison with modern feminist authors. Nor is it a book to be read in the hope of rediscovering almost forgotten characters from our literary past.

Perhaps like Judy Turner whose words imply discontent, I  wanted this book to be more than it was. I wanted literary criticism of women writers which certainly at the time was in short supply if the reference books I have are anything to go by.  But what Modjeska delivers instead is an assertion of the significance of women writers in the interwar years.  Which makes it all the more obvious that the token literary criticism there that there was, had failed to grasp a significant literary movement.  She interrogates women’s fiction to see if they were writing about political issues that affect women rather than just the ‘domestic’ issues that marginalised women’s fiction for so long.  Part of that was redefining what ‘domestic’ issues are…

[Would anyone today suggest that Eleanor Dark’s exposure of the way women experienced mental health services in Prelude to Christopher, was a ‘domestic issue’?]

Turner, writing her review in 1982, also seems disappointed that Exiles at Home doesn’t offer ‘almost forgotten characters from our literary past’ to discover.  I wonder who she means.  Certainly, Modjeska doesn’t offer authors who are new to me now, three decades later.  Indeed, it seems to me that one need only have paid passing interest to this blog and others like it to be familiar with the writers featured in Modjeska’s survey.

Though to be fair, that was possibly not the case for non-academic readers in 1981 when Exiles at Home was first published. It’s easy to forget that in those days before the internet and its niche litblogs, before Wikipedia, before Project Gutenberg Australia, before the Untapped project and before the Text Classics collection and other similar reissues of books once long out of print, many writers — male and female — were forgotten and their books were almost impossible to source.

Exiles at Home did, however, introduce me to some books that were new to me.  I was interested in what Modjeska has to say about Jean Devanny’s The Virtuous Courtesan (1935) because although I’ve read Sugar Heaven (1936) I’d never heard of this one:

In The Virtuous Courtesan, Jean Devanny addresses herself to the conjuncture of class and sex, one of the few novels of the time to do so. Who is the prostitute, the novel asks, the respectable woman who marries for property, and grants her favours for prestigious associations, or the professional with a heart of gold who whores to keep her family together? Poppy, honest and generous on the streets, is contrasted with Inez, the mean, manipulative woman of the bourgeoisie. The Virtuous Courtesan shows how women are exploited by men regardless of class, but emphasises the variation in class response. More often than not the middle class women are sycophantic and parasitic, while the working class women work and live hard, making what they can of their situation. At least the bourgeois men in the novel work, whereas the women make no social contribution. Central to the novel is a love affair between a working class man and a middle class woman. While Jack defends Sharon as “our kind if … not our class”, ultimately her class background dominates and the affair is a disaster, ending in disillusionment and bitterness for poor honest proletarian Jack. While marriage and sexual relations are a game for the bourgeoisie, a way of maximising and maintaining class privilege, for the working class marriage is either serious, entered for love, or simply a means of survival. (Loc 4730)

[One can’t help thinking of the sexual politics in Fiona Kelly McGregor’s 2022 depiction of the petty criminal Iris and her milieu of women in Sydney’s sly-grog underworld from the 1930s-1950s. See my review for why this book made its way onto so many shortlists.)

Searching for some trace of The Virtuous Courtesan, I found at Search that it was one of the first Australian novels with openly lesbian characters, but censorship meant that it had to be published in New York.  Potentially, it could be an interesting novel, but before I part with my money ($USD30 at AbeBooks) I’d like to know whether its political aspects are heavy-handed or if the novel is actually good to read. As you can see in my review of Sugar Heaven, I found it ‘worthy’ but much of it was plodding and dull.

OTOH I already have a copy of Kylie Tennant’s debut novel Tiburon (1935), which is apparently also social realism though less ‘punchy’ than Devanny’s work. Modjeska recognises it as having some literary qualities that Devanny’s novels lack.

Tiburon and her subsequent novels, Foveaux [also on my TBR] and The Battlers [1941, see my review], are packed with social detail and achieve a sense of life and movement that is too often missing in Jean Devanny’s work. (Loc 4730)

Modjeska finds Katharine Susannah Prichard’s feminism wanting, suggesting that she was pulled between a romanticism that linked vitality and passion with sexuality and instinct, and a social analysis that sought to lay bare the mechanisms of exploitation.  But despite the literary qualities of KSP’s writing that led to her nomination for the Nobel Prize, Modjeska’s analysis of her oeuvre is primarily focussed on sexual politics.

The last chapter, ‘Past and Present’ is the best. It puts the work of these women writers in context, and traces developments that impacted on literary culture in the post war era, including the emergence of mass culture in the form of bulk fiction, magazines, film and radio.

Despite […] the radical shift in the intellectual and cultural climate in Australia after the war, the thirties have not been given the recognition they deserve either as formative, or even as significant years in their own right. I would suggest, moreover, that the form taken by the socialist realist literature of the fifties owes as much to this indigenous tradition as it did to the influence of cultural theories originating in Stalinist Russia. The theory of socialist realism, which had already been introduced into Australia during the thirties, and the discussions of Marxist aesthetics fell on fertile ground and could take shape in a literary environment particularly well suited to it. (Loc 5208)

She also makes a compelling argument about masculinist literary criticism:

Part of the neglect of women writers, a neglect which is by no means confined to the women writers of the thirties, is, of course, due to a predominantly masculine view within literary criticism and literary history which does not recognise as legitimate the themes and subject matter of much of women’s fiction. Consequently, even when “novels of protest” are considered, as in an essay by Stephen Murray-Smith, the sorts of protests that women have made are not recognised at all. Murray-Smith dismisses the thirties as a period dominated by the publication of romances, many of them historical, and he dates the rise of the novel of protest as after 1943, allowing Katharine Prichard and Kylie Tennant as the only exceptions. Katharine Prichard was, of course, a member of the Communist Party, which immediately puts her in the protest category. Kylie Tennant’s early novels Tiburon and The Battlers were uncompromising in their documentation of unemployment, poverty and social inequality. Stephen Murray-Smith simply does not see as novels of protest such books as Eleanor Dark’s Return to Coolami (1936) or Waterway (1938), M. Barnard Eldershaw’s A House is Built or The Glasshouse, or Dymphna Cusack’s Jungfrau, to mention a few. Yet these are angry novels protesting against loveless marriage, intellectual frustration, unwanted pregnancy, sexual hypocrisy and moral cowardice. Serious literature, it is assumed, is not about abortion, far less is it about the ironing. (Loc 5239)

But, she says, it’s not all male chauvinism, it’s also about the teaching of Australian literature in the universities:

What is taught in university English departments is not irrelevant; it influences the people who go out to be school teachers, it forms a body of opinion on what constitutes Australian literature, it influences research projects, the publication of criticism, commentaries, biographies, even the reprints of novels. It was not until after the war and more particularly until the expansion of the universities from the end of the fifties that Australian literature has been taught in substantial measure in our universities. (Loc 6258)

Has this changed?  I’d love to hear from university students about this.

Anyway, while Exiles at Home now represents more of a moment in time than an enduring literary reference book, it’s interesting to speculate on its influence.  Would I have 16 literary biographies of women writers on my TBR if Exiles at Home hadn’t brought attention to women writers? Who knows?

See also M D Brady’s review at Me, You and Books. It’s sad to see that this blog has been inactive since 2020.

Author: Drusilla Modjeska
Title: Exiles at Home, Australian Women Writers 1925-1945
Publisher: Angus & Robertson, 2014, first published 1981
ASIN: ‎ B00EXE6CEM, Kindle Edition, 296 pages
Purchased for the Kindle from AmazonAU, $3.99