Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
writers, all enhancing our understanding not only of Catherine Helen Spence but
also of her times. Here I present a brief account of that scholarship to accompany
this new edition of my book.
First: the newly-identified sources of information. One work which prompts a reconsideration
of almost every aspect of Catherine Spence’s life because it compels
attention to her domestic life, ‘the core’, as historian Peter Cochrane notes, ‘that guides
or drives or perhaps explains the public life’, was something that she wrote herself. But
it is not her own. It is her record of her mother’s recollections of life in Scotland and
early years in Australia. Edited by Judy King and Graham Tulloch, Tenacious of the Past:
The Recollections of Helen Brodie, published in 1994, elaborates the class-characterisation
of her parents’ families, and her parents’ relationship with each other.
Theirs had been a love-match. At twenty-four, Helen Brodie could have been
considered a ‘bonnie lass’, with dark brown hair and fine blue-grey eyes which were
large, clear and expressive, distracting from her short nose, her florid complexion,
‘the face round rather than oval’, and her ‘stout compact figure’. David Spence was
twenty-six, tall at five feet ten inches (178 cms) and had a long nose and pale skin;
he was going bald already, but a high forehead was in favour at the time. She was a
daughter of six or seven generations of tenant farmers and a snob: she had so fine
a sense of social gradation as to object to the people she found herself among – retail
traders – as ‘some degrees lower in position and education than her own circle’
when she visited London as a young woman. He had been educated to be a lawyer, a
Writer to the Signet, and won favour for his educated voice and manner. Moreover,
they shared their progressive liberal politics. The future glowed as they settled into
the pretty lowlands village of Melrose.
Sadly, that shine quickly dimmed. Their politics separated them from ‘the better
class of society’, and the townsfolk who formed their primary circle of acquaintance
were ‘very narrow and very dull’. David Spence’s investments were not doing well,
and he took to working at night as well as all day, ‘going over his books’. Their first
child was not born until three years after their marriage. Most importantly for the
events that followed, the only one of her children that Helen Brodie was able to
suckle was the child who bore her own name, Catherine Helen, the fifth of eight.
And she was the child who – as Unbridling the tongues of women relates – set about
trying to make up for her father’s financial difficulties, after the family had suffered
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