AustLit

'This paper provides explores the life and work of Elsie Ruth (Lyn) Palmer (1934- 1969), an unpublished writer from Melbourne whose experiences as a lesbian writer during the 1950s form a framework for exploring a range of issues around failure, queer identity, and literary endeavour. By examining Palmer’s life and work in the broader context of her times, the paper argues for a re-examination of the current fashion for celebrating or embracing failure, connecting this rhetorical pressure to ‘embrace failure’ with an outdated Romantic notion of the suffering artist, and with suffering as a pre-condition for artistic excellence. The paper explores the ways in which this problematic fetishising of failure ignores the influence and impact of class, gender and sexual identity in the structure of suffering, and its resolution.' (Publication abstract)