Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Round woman in her round hole
commerce, Turner was also a leading light in Melbourne’s intellectual circles. Together
with Arthur Patchett Martin and Alexander Sutherland (who was the head
of Carlton College, acting professor of English Literature at Melbourne University,
and acting-registrar of the University at the time of his death in 1902), Turner was
planning to establish a new periodical. They held that earlier attempts to ‘acclimatize
periodical literature’ had been too lightweight and parochial to compete successfully
with the imported English monthlies and the local weekly papers. But this venture,
the Melbourne Review, would devote its pages to ‘subjects of more solid character
and more permanent interest’ than those of its predecessors; ‘articles on Philosophy,
Theology, Science, Art and Politics’, they declared, would form its leading features.
Turner asked Spence for the manuscript of her lecture to include in his new undertaking.
Her article appeared in the second number of the Melbourne Review, in
1876, and this one appeared over her name. 15
That signalled the end of her anonymity. Two years later, the Register’s editors
offered her regular employment on it literary pages. Spence was jubilant. ‘What a
glorious opening’ she exclaimed, ‘for my ambition and my literary proclivities came
to me in July 1878 …!’ 16 She was to take the place of Howard Clark. He had become
a part-proprietor of the Register in 1865 and its editor in 1870. He did not, a later
editor judged, have ‘a news nose’, but as a writer he was held to have possessed ‘abilities
of the highest order’; ‘the versatility of his talents found full play in the humorous
column’, in theatrical criticism, and in entertaining literary articles and book
reviews. His death in 1878 left a noticeable gap in the paper. His successor as editor,
John Harvey Finlayson, wanted to maintain and, if possible, improve the standard
of its literary pages, and hoped that Spence’s appointment
might make up for the loss of Clark.
Given Clark’s reputation, that was already both
a tall order and a measure of the esteem she had
won. 17 However, she was not restricted to literary
articles. In 1877 both the Melbourne Review and
the English journal, Fraser’s Magazine, had printed
articles she had written on land legislation
and imperial union. The Register had noted the
first, remarking that it was ‘characterized by the
John Howard Clark.
Image courtesy of the State Library of
South Australia SLSA: B3902
clearness of thought and argument and attention
to detail displayed in all Miss Spence’s writings’.
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