AustLit

The two books under review are, respectively, the seventh and eighth volumes to appear in the estimable Academy Editions of Australian Literature series. Initiated in 1992 under the general editorship of Professor Paul Eggert, the series is the first to provide modern scholarly editions of the key works of Australian literature, including reliable reading texts and contextual annotation based on rigorous scholarship and thorough textual collation. Previous volumes of especial interest to European readers include Marcus Clarke's His Natural Life (1874); Catherine Martin's An Australian Girl (1890), which draws extensively on the context of nineteenth-century European thought; and Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest (1908), which is set in the musical world of fin-de-siècle Leipzig.