Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Introduction to the new edition
grandmother, after the children had been left orphans in the 1860s until the late
1880s, at one time being nursed in bed with some kind of back problem for as long
as three years, at another copying out all of her aunt’s three-decker novel, ‘Handfasted’,
because Miss Spence thought Eleanor’s handwriting would give it a better
chance of winning a prize than her own. The two letters are about Catherine Spence’s
death on 3 April 1910, and they reveal disagreements about Auntie Kate’s will.
Lucy Spence Morice.
Image courtesy of the State
Library of South Australia
SLSA: B58523.
At the core of the trouble was Lucy Morice’s belief
that control of her aunt’s affairs had been wrested from her
by Ellen Gregory who, as a member of the household in
which Catherine Spence had been living, had found a will
written fifteen years earlier which gave such control, instead,
to the Wrens. Ellen Gregory was not, as Unbridling
the tongues of women suggests, a chosen intimate friend of
Miss Spence. But she was a cousin of the young Wrens,
born in 1852, only about ten years older than they were,
and since Catherine Spence felt responsible for her presence
in South Australia, she made a place for her in the
succession of households that she formed. She called her
‘Cousin’ when referring to her in letters to the Wrens, ‘coz’
in her diary. Miss Gregory would go out sewing in other
people’s households to earn something towards her living, but it was never an independent
living; Miss Spence regarded her as one of her own financial responsibilities.
Miss Gregory, in turn, provided domestic support for Miss Spence in those households.
Catherine Spence noted that she was ‘the prop and mainstay of my old age’.
Lucy Morice probably wanted to be the person who completed her aunt’s unfinished
Autobiography. Eleanor Wren wrote asking her if she would undertake that
task, but she did not reply immediately: ‘I was too ill to think the day I got her letter’,
she told Rose Scott. She did write accepting the proposal, she said, but before
she posted her letter, she received another from Eleanor Wren saying that she had
decided that the best person for the job was Jeanne F. Young, Miss Spence’s lieutenant
in her campaigns for proportional representation. Between them Eleanor Wren,
Jeanne Young and the editor of the South Australian Register, William Sowden, decided
that Mrs Young should complete Miss Spence’s narrative, writing in the first
person, ‘to avoid a break in the story’. Eleanor Wren handed over to Jeanne Young
the diaries that Catherine Spence had kept every year of her life, and a ‘mass of
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