AustLit

'This article considers the 'secret life' of two Australians who worked for brief periods in intelligence and transmuted aspects of their experience in stories they subsequently told. Herbert Dyce Murphy's depictions of himself as a 'lady spy' in Europe in the early 1900s came to influence Australia's premier novelist Patrick White in the characterisation of his homosexual protagonist in White's novel The Twyborn Affair (1979). For Dyce Murphy and White, as for W H Auden and others, the image of the spy held maginative appeal as a way of projecting the necessary disguises, subterfuges and possibilities that a life of secrecy entailed.' (Author's abstract)