'Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is the story of the secret passion between an explorer and a naïve young woman. Although they have met only a few times, Voss and Laura are joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. Voss sets out to cross the continent. As hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment to Laura gradually increases. Laura, waiting in Sydney, moves through the months of separation as if they were a dream and Voss the only reality.
'From the careful delineation of Victorian society to the sensitive rendering of hidden love to the stark narrative of adventure in the Australian desert, Patrick White's novel is a work of extraordinary power and virtuosity.'
Source: Random House Books (Sighted 21/09/2012)
Voss was adapted into an opera by author David Malouf and composer Richard Meale. It was first performed by the Australian Opera in Adelaide, March 1986.
'Many literary sources have been suggested for Patrick White’s fifth novel, Voss, ranging from the surreal symbolism of Rimbaud’s poetry, to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. White himself explicitly acknowledged the influence of two works by Australian women writers in his depiction of colonial society: Ruth Bedford’s family history, Think of Stephen: A Family Chronicle (1954), and M. Barnard Eldershaw’s prizewinning novel A House is Built (1929). Bedford, a granddaughter of Sir Alfred Stephen, Chief Justice of New South Wales from 1844 to 1873, drew on family papers to give a detailed account of the social life of the elite of Sydney from the 1840s to 1880s, commenting on the demands of household management on the women as well as describing picnics, balls, and dinners. Barnard Eldershaw absorbed references to historical events such as the gold rushes and Sydney landmarks like the convict-built Barracks and St Andrew’s Cathedral into their novel. They provide ample detail of architecture, furniture, and clothing in descriptions of the social and domestic life of the Hyde family and associates: sewing, paying formal calls, hosting dinners, concert- and theatregoing. There are resemblances with Voss’s Bonner family, including structural similarities in the contrast of the two principal female characters and their fates. This discussion traces the influence of these works of Bedford and Barnard Eldershaw in Voss.' (Publication abstract)
'Embracing the environmental, eco-materialist and planetary turn in the humanities, prompted by the Anthropocene, this paper offers a reading of Voss as an environmental and planetary epic. The unique environmental qualities of Patrick White’s writing, and his later-life activism, have perhaps suffered due to a focus on the psychological and spiritual aspects of his biography. Reading Voss as a journey ‘into the dust’ (213), away from colonial Sydney, and associated Eurocentric forms, this paper argues that the very material and elemental nature of the Australian environment emerges as an agentive and subversive presence, suggested by the insidiously small, yet itinerant dust. White’s journey inland, into the ‘kingdom of dust’ (297), shatters, fragments, and erodes the stable, the terran and the fixed, but through that very reduction, the story becomes engrained in elemental and planetary forces. The disruptive aesthetics, connected to the drying of the material environment and the desert, immerses the reader in an errant environment in motion. This paper argues that the epic qualities of the story are imparted through this very contact with the environment, the elemental and the planetary, positioning Voss as a planetary epic.' (Publication abstract)
'One of Patrick White’s working notebooks, acquired by the National Library of Australia in 2006, is almost exclusively devoted to material related to his breakthrough novel Voss (1957), which marks a new departure in his career. It is a historical novel set in Australia’s colonial period, though with thematic connections to White’s earlier works. Close attention to Notebook 5 shows how extensively White researched its historical background and how he absorbed that research, sometimes transposing details verbatim into Voss. While certain material deals with Ludwig Leichhardt and his expeditions into the interior (for example Daniel Bunce’s Travels with Dr Leichhardt in Australia [1859] and Alec H. Chisholm’s Strange New World [1941]), it is apparent that White is more interested in details of Leichhardt’s various journeys than in debates about the man himself. He read other explorers, notably Edward John Eyre, and settlers of whom John Dunmore Lang is prominent, his notes revealing a particular interest in Aboriginal people. A second strand of White’s research informs those sections of Voss set in Sydney in the 1840s, and a third involves theological and philosophical speculations about the nature of faith that are reflected in the musings of Laura Trevelyan and others. In addition, there are fragments of draft of both Voss and Riders in the Chariot (1961), indicating that White was already incubating the later novel as he was completing Voss. It appears too that he undertook major restructuring of Voss at a late stage.' (Introduction)
'This article reads Patrick White’s 1957 novel Voss as an early example of Neo-Victorian fiction, a relatively recent but critically well-established category of postwar and contemporary fiction that has not yet been deployed with reference to Voss. I argue that, while seemingly adopting the elements of Australian narratives of exploration and settlement, White’s Neo-Victorian approach in fact contests these narratives, which began to emerge in the nineteenth century that forms the setting of the novel and were still current in the mid-twentieth century when it was written. In so doing, Voss exposes the tensions and contradictions inherent in settler narratives more generally and shows their reliance on social, cultural, and textual models imported from Britain, primary among them rural domesticity and the pastoral. My reading of Voss challenges existing scholarship on White’s novel, which tends to see Voss either as a contribution to the discourse of Australian national identity or as a work interested in ahistorical, mythological self-realization for the two protagonists, Ulrich Voss and Laura Trevelyan.' (Publication abstract)