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The Dark Tower : Dorothy Hewett single work   biography  
Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 The Dark Tower : Dorothy Hewett
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

In one of Dorothy Hewett's later poems, 'Lines to the Dark Tower', a girl moves into an empty wheat silo.' There she lives alone, entranced by the view of blowing grass and flowing river and spinning windmills, and weaving what she sees into a magical web, like a twentieth-century West Australian Lady of Shalott. But unlike Tennyson's Lady, she does not pretend to be indifferent to the passing parade. The moment a knight rides by — or, rather, 'some talker / ...his helmet / hanging on the back of his head', or 'one of the silent watchers / ill met by moonlight / his eyes flaming underneath his visor' — she runs from her sanctuary, irresistibly drawn by the promise and the possibility, the drama and the pleasure, of love. was always ready to be inveigled / out of the tower', she confesses. She is a figure for Hewett herself, who at 16 was as excited by the possibilities of her future as a lover as she was by those of her future as an artist. At that age, indeed, she saw no distinction between them.'  (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

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    y separately published work icon A Free Flame : Australian Women Writers and Vocation in the Twentieth Century Ann-Marie Priest , Crawley : UWA Publishing , 2018 12178428 2018 multi chapter work biography

    ''I need to be a writer,' Ruth Park told her future husband, D'Arcy Niland, on the eve of their marriage. 'That's what I need from life.'

    'She was not the only one. At a time when women were considered incapable of being 'real' artists, a number of precocious girls in Australian cities were weighing their chances and laying their plans.

    'A Free Flame explores the lives of four such women, Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Christina Stead and Ruth Park, each of whom went on to become a notable Australian writer.

    'They were very different women from very different backgrounds, but they shared a sense of urgency around their vocation - their 'need' to be a writer - that would not let them rest.

    'Weaving biography, literary criticism and cultural history, this book looks at the ways in which these women laid siege to the artist's identity, and ultimately remade it in their own image.' (Publication summary)

    Crawley : UWA Publishing , 2018
Last amended 19 Apr 2018 06:54:40
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