The Unsociable Sociability of Women s Lifewriting

The Unsociable Sociability of Women s Lifewriting

The Unsociable Sociability of Women s Lifewriting Edited by Anne Collett and Louise D Arcens Palgrave macmillan

Selection and editorial matter Anne Collett and Louise D Arcens 2010 Individual chapters contributors 2010 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978 0 230 24647 8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-31959-6 ISBN 978-0-230-29486-8 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/ 9780230294868 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The unsociable sociability of women s lifewriting / edited by Anne Collett, Louise D Arcens. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Literature Women authors History and criticism. 2. Autobiography Women authors. 3. Women in literature. 4. Self in literature. 5. Self-presentation in literature. 6. Social interaction in literature. 7. Autobiography in literature. I. Collett, Anne. II. D Arcens, Louise. PN471.U67 2010 809'.933522 dc22 2010027497 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

Contents List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors vii viii x 1 Femmes a part : Unsociable Sociability, Women, Lifewriting 1 Louise D Arcens and Anne Collett 2 Je, Christine : Christine de Pizan s Autobiographical Topoi 18 Louise D Arcens 3 Law, Gender and Print Culture in the Lifewriting of Eliza Frances Robertson 37 Sarah Ailwood 4 Some Stories Need to Be Told, Then Told Again : Yvonne Johnson and Rudy Wiebe 54 Michael Jacklin 5 The Scripted Life of Peig Sayers 71 Irene Lucchitti 6 Yet Thou Did Deliver Me : The Exemplary Life of Alice Thornton 89 Anne Lear 7 Size Matters: The Oppositional Self-Portraiture of Emily Carr 107 Anne Collett 8 A Literary Fortune: Mary Fortune s Life in the Colonial Periodical Press 128 Megan Brown 9 You for Whom I Wrote : Renée Vivien, H.D. and the Roman à Clef 148 Melissa Boyde 10 Writing Food Writing Fiction Writing Life: Marion Halligan s Memoirs 168 Dorothy Jones v

vi Contents 11 Writing as Cultural Negotiation: Suneeta Peres da Costa and Alice Pung 187 Wenche Ommundsen 12 The Language of Recognition: Carolyn Slaughter and Alexandra Fuller 204 Tony Simoes da Silva Selected Bibliography 221 Index 224

List of Illustrations 1 Emily Carr, The Little Pine, 1931, oil on canvas, 112.0 x 68.8 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.14 Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery 110 2 Emily Carr, Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky, 1935, oil on canvas, 112.0 x 68.9 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.15 Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery 123 vii

Preface and Acknowledgements The painting featured on the cover, The Lacquer Room (1935) by the Australian modernist Grace Cossington Smith, captures in a single remarkable image the central theme of this book. Notwithstanding its reputation as one of Cossington Smith s great celebrations of modern Sydney, the painting is striking for the ambivalence of its depiction of women in an urban communal space. For all the genteel, bustling amity in this café s Art Deco interior, there is also an unmistakable urban anomie, as its diners sit either solitary or in silent couples, adjacent to one another but not quite together. The space is quasi-domestic yet emphatically public, welcoming yet detached: sociable yet unsociable. This sense of the painting s ambivalence is underlined by what we know of the artist herself. Living for most of her adult life in the suburban seclusion of her parents home, Cossington Smith dwelt at the fringes of Sydney s thriving modernist scene. Her work might have defined it, but she was never fully a part of it. She is, as her stark 1948 self-portrait also attests, a fellow-traveller of the sociably unsociable women discussed in the pages that follow. This volume began life as a workshop in 2006 organized by the Lifewriting Group within the Literature, Identity and Culture (LIC) research strength of the Arts Faculty, University of Wollongong, Australia. We were fortunate to have had Professor Gillian Whitlock of the University of Queensland as our guest speaker at this workshop. Her thought-provoking comments led us to define our project with greater assurance, and for this we thank her. We also wish to acknowledge the University of Wollongong Arts Faculty s financial support for the workshop, as well as its support for costs associated with the volume s indexing, proofreading and image acquisition. Heartfelt thanks also go to our contributors for their enthusiasm, responsiveness, patience and collegiality. From the time of the first workshop, through numerous subsequent meetings, to the last stages of editing, they have truly been a joy to work with. Our editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Paula Kennedy and Ben Doyle, have been models of professionalism. At all stages of the volume s development and production they have been unfailingly efficient, courteous and supportive. We wish to express our sincere gratitude to them for making a potentially arduous process seem easy. viii

Preface and Acknowledgements ix Our thanks go also to Chris Tiffin for his expert proofreading and indexing. We wish to acknowledge the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Ann Mills for granting us permission to reproduce The Lacquer Room. Finally, we wish to thank our families for their support throughout the process of working on this project. Anne Collett and Louise D Arcens

Notes on Contributors Contributors to this book were all members of the Women s Lifewriting Project associated with the Literature, Identity and Culture Research Group, based in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Wollongong, Australia. All continue to be associated with the University of Wollongong except Sarah Ailwood, who has subsequently taken up a lectureship at the University of Canberra. Sarah Ailwood is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Canberra. She completed her PhD in English literature at the University of Wollongong in 2008, and has worked in various legal professional roles. Her new project combines her research interests in literature and law to investigate women s autobiographies as responses to their experiences with law and justice. Melissa Boyde is a Research Fellow working in the fields of modernist art and writing, and animal ethics and representation. Recent publications include articles on the modernist writers Hope Mirrlees and Djuna Barnes and the Australian modernist artist Mary Alice Evatt. She is currently writing Evatt s biography and co-editing a book on cultural representations of animals. Currently completing a PhD that examines Mary Fortune s writing in the Australian Journal from 1865 to 1885, Megan Brown has published on Mary Fortune in the special edition of Australian Literary Studies in honour of Elizabeth Webby in 2007. She has also written about Louisa Atkinson, a colonial journalist botanist and novelist. Anne Collett led the Women s Lifewriting project and the Literature, Identity and Culture Research Group. She has published widely in the field of postcolonial women s writing with a focus on Australia, Canada and the Caribbean, and has edited Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing & Culture since 2000. Louise D Arcens has published numerous chapters and articles on medieval women s writing and is co-editor of Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholarship (2004). Her other research interest is in Australian medievalism. She teaches medieval and modern literature in the English Literatures Program. x

Notes on Contributors xi Michael Jacklin is a Research Fellow whose research interests include Indigenous literatures, collaboration in lifewriting, literatures of displacement and diaspora, and multicultural writing. His publications have appeared in journals including Life Writing, Antipodes, Kunapipi, ARIEL and JASAL, and his current research contributes to the AustLit database. Expatriate New Zealander and Honorary Fellow in the School of English Literatures, Philosophy and Languages, Dorothy Jones taught at the University of Wollongong from 1971 to 1996. She has published widely in the area of postcolonial literature, with special emphasis on women writers. Diaries and letters by nineteenth-century women settlers in Australia, New Zealand and Canada are major topics in several of her published papers. Anne Lear is a Senior Lecturer in the English Literatures Program. Her current research interests are focused on English women s lifewriting in the early modern period. She has published on the autobiographical writing of Alice Thornton, Anne Clifford and the nineteenth-century Anglo-Australian Rachel Henning. A specialist in early twentieth-century Irish literature and culture, with expertise in lifewriting and translation studies, Irene Lucchitti has recently published a book on the autobiographical writings of Tomás O Crohan (Ó Criomhthain) of the Blasket Islands ( Reimagining Ireland series, 2009) and is currently writing another on Peig Sayers. Tony Simoes da Silva researches in the areas of Anglophone and Lusophone African studies and Australian writing. Recently published essays appear in refereed journals such as ARIEL (2009), Third World Quarterly (2005), Kunapipi (2008) and Life Writing (2004), as well as in collections published by Routledge (2008) and Lexington Books (2008). Formerly Professor of English Literatures, Wenche Ommundsen is currently Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Wollongong. She has published extensively in the area of multicultural and diasporic literary traditions, most recently on Asian-Australian literary interactions. Her latest book is Cultural Citizenship and the Challenges of Globalisation (2010).