AustLit

'Colonial Australian Women Poets' examines the significant roles of five women poets: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, Mary Bailey, Caroline Leakey, Emily Manning and Louisa Lawson. The work of these poets can outline the development of women’s poetry in Australia and internationally across the nineteenth century, and their inclusion radically alters current scholarship, rethinking the ways in which women poets, feminist politics, and the legacies of Romanticism relate to colonial poetry. Colonial poetry in Australia has generally been interpreted through a lens of oppositionality or insularity.

'Bush nationalism had come to be considered the essential ‘Australian literature’ and the colonial writings that preceded it have often been viewed as ineffectual precursors. Such masculine nationalist approaches have not acknowledged that colonial Australian women’s poetry represents an intellectually sophisticated, extensively networked and important contribution to the development of Australian poetry. Further, this poetry is often highly politically radical in ways that extend beyond emergent masculine nationalism. Australian literary studies have also typically viewed Romanticism as an absence. The gaps between the scholarship questioning the role of Romanticism in colonial Australian poetry and scholarship concerned with Australian women’s poetry produced at this time also suggests the legacy of Romantic issues around gender and political voice. These women poets were all concerned with what a feminist approach to class and all in various ways reflect ideas of both a class fall and radical social reform, closely associated with concepts of Australia’s relationship to the old world, through Romantic legacies. In positioning women poets from colonial Australia in relation to European and North American movements, this study challenges the dominant cartography of Australian literature’s relationship to Romanticism, as well as considers ways in which their inclusion re-maps Australian literary history. It foregrounds women’s contributions, particularly in assuming and mobilising a political voice, to ‘both’ a transnational Romantic tradition and what Katie Hansord terms a regional Australian Romanticism.

'The poets are examined through a transnational frame, which foregrounds challenges to women’s subjugation, as well as oppression relating to class and race. Since studies of colonial Australian women writers have tended to focus on those writing novels or journals, women’s poetry of the period has received less critical attention. The highly gender-conscious writing of these poets reflects knowledgeable and innovative political dialogues that consistently demonstrate the global context of colonial women’s poetry. These poets often took what may be considered a cosmopolitan approach, which extended beyond British or emergent Australian nationalisms, in which gender was recognised as a unifying category far more than nation or Empire, extending their interests across ancient cultures, including Greek, Roman, as well as Indian, Italian, North American, French and European cultures, and sometimes incorporating discourses around slavery, Indigeneity, and new and old-world dichotomies. These approaches were Anglophone, white and Eurocentric, but the cultural breadth of their feminist approaches often disrupts nationalist modes of thinking, and emergent Australian masculine nationalism specifically, and this is what Hansord means when she uses the term transnational in the book as a whole. Certainly, this transnational framing coincides with imperialist frames and these are operating simultaneously. In the contexts of these women’s writing, these frames are inseparable. This book is concerned with the related historical relationships of women’s political writing and gender to colonialism, literary Romanticism and emerging national identities. Themes explored in this study, demonstrating these poets’ access to a political discourse of gender and class, include abolitionism, Hellenism, eroticism and spiritualism. In prioritising the contributions of women, particularly through print culture, this study seeks to recognise colonial Australian women’s poetry as a transnational literature, politicised by its engagement with imperialist and nationalist discourses at a transnational level.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This essay considers two important Australian women poets in the tradition of nineteenth-century working-class poetry, focusing on representations of gender and labour in the work of Louisa Lawson (1848-1920) and Mary Fortune (1833-1911). Fortune, who wrote fiction, journalism and poetry, is best known for her highly prolific and innovative detective writing, published in 1871 as The Detective’s Album: Recollections of an Australian Police Officer. While more poems published under her pen-names of “M. H. F.,” “W. W.,” and “Waif Wander” have recently been uncovered through the digitisation of newspapers, Fortune’s poetic output still appears to have been slighter than her writing in other genres. However, her poetry deserves attention for its place in the tradition of radical Australian working-class poetry. Louisa Lawson, whose contribution to Australian radical literature is well-known, also explored connections between labour and gender in her poetry. An analysis of her poem “They Are Taking the Old Piano” (1906) and its poetic relationship to the British poet Eliza Cook’s “The Old Arm-Chair” (1837), shows that the past and ideas of material comfort are evoked through the emphasis placed on specific physical objects relating to the “domestic sphere” within a tradition of “sentimental” poetics. Like other radical women poets, Lawson succeeds in adapting a popular sentimental mode or genre in order to highlight issues about women’s access to financial independence and the right to work.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay considers Caroline Leakey's volume of poetry, Lyra Australis, or Attempts to Sing in a Strange Land (1854), and argues that the more broadly feminist aspects of Leakey’s poetry, particularly its sympathetic portrayal of ‘the fallen woman’, are connected with developments in Anglophone women’s poetry in the first half of the nineteenth century. It reads Leakey's volume as a radical rejection of the increasing restrictions placed on sympathetic narratives about ‘fallen women’ by the mid nineteenth century by contextualising it within broader frameworks of women’s writing on the fallen woman.'

Source: Abstract.

'Scholarship on Louisa Lawson and the Dawn has necessarily often focussed on the important and wide-ranging achievements of her feminist work for women's legal, social and political rights. Indeed, as Audrey Oldfield notes, "Louisa Lawson was one of the most important figures in the New South Wales woman suffrage movement" (261). However, I want to focus here on the periodical publishing context of the Dawn as a means of pointing to further discussions of Lawson's significance as a poet. Megan Roughley has noted that the Dawn "was a forum for political causes, especially the movement for the emancipation and enfranchisement of women, and, as importantly to Louisa, the temperance movement" (ix), with influential articles appearing on a wide range of important issues including divorce reform. Yet, Lawson's construction of the Dawn was also highly literary from its first issue, with editorial choices and literary references reflecting her awareness of political and feminist literary culture. In addition to references such as the above quotation from Tennyson, Lawson included an epigraph from Joseph Addison's play Cato in the list of contents: "A day, an hour, in virtuous liberty, is worth a whole eternity in bondage." Citing Addison, a significant figure in the American Revolution, demonstrates Lawson's linking of radical class politics with feminism, as well as highlighting the importance of literary dialogues to Lawson's publishing work. Likewise, the concerns of Lawson's poetry are clearly situated within a continuing female tradition, and Lawson's poetry, when examined in the feminist literary context of the Dawn, reveals a radical and sophisticated poetics.'

Source: Abstract.