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Description
Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925-1945
by Drusilla Modjeska.
Sirius (Angus & Robertson), Sydney, 1984.
Reprint, paperback.
Cover illustration ‘Portrait of Lucie Beynis 1929’ by Grace Cowley.
‘It may be that the novels of the thirties will start to take on a new significance now that Australia’s facing, once again, economic depression and not a dissimilar crisis in democracy,’ Modejeska wrote in 1981. ‘It may be that women’s fiction coming into its own again under the impetus of contemporary feminism, will obtain new strengths, new shapes, and will, once again, take a formative place in Australian writing. Everything is pointing that way.’ (pp. 257-258).
Modjeska’s ground-breaking 1981 study of an extraordinary flowering of inter-war Australian women novelists, which was supported by critic and writer Netti Palmer. The history reminded the world of novelists Jean Devanney, Kylie Tennant, Dymphna Cusack, Miles Franklin, Eleanor Dark, Katherine Susannah Prichard, Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw, driving both a publishing revival of 1930s women writers and a critical reappraisal of women’s literary production. Modjeska’s call to read the past in order to understand what is possible is as relevant to feminists today.
Condition: Cover has very minor curl to top right-hand corner and wear to spine. Pages clean and unmarked. Overall in very good condition.
