Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

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Acquiring a room of her own Catherine Helen Spence. Image reproduced from a photograph in Jeanne F. Young, Catherine Helen Spence: A Study and an Appreciation (Lothian Publishing Co. Pty. Ltd.) Melbourne, 1937. 31
Unbridling the tongues of women She believed in a deity that signalled pre-destined salvation to the elect through their prosperity; she could not have helped feeling her first experience of economic hardship as a forewarning of damnation. For the Spences, hardship seems to have lasted longer than the depression did. They sold the cows. William and John went off to farm the 80-acre section, probably at Noarlunga, but without success. The rest of the family moved to lodgings in Halifax Street, because they were cheaper. 43 In her first published novel, Spence was to depict a young gentlewoman, newly arrived in South Australia without resources or connections, accepting employment as a maid-of-allwork. Her description of an experience felt as social degradation undoubtedly drew flavour and detail from her own. Spence’s education became, in so altered a world, her refuge, her badge of respectability, her only claim to attention. Neighbours of the Spences in Halifax Street remembered that Catherine, as a girl in her teens, would go through the streets with several books under her arm, often reading as she went. ‘We always thought,’ one commentator said, ‘that she was so vain of her knowledge that she paraded it a great deal more than was necessary’, 44 a comment epitomising the attitudes that left her isolated. She may have been making her badge obvious, but she seems more to have been reading to shut out the world. ‘The few books we had, or which we could borrow’, she wrote, ‘I read over and over again. Aikin’s British Poets, ... and Goldsmith’s complete works … were thoroughly mastered, and the Waverly novels down to Quentin Durward were well absorbed’. 45 Her account of the heroine in her second novel, struggling to find congenial conversation among her fellow colonists, and her picture of the hero of a later novel (Gathered In), tormented by religious doubt and isolated from anyone who could talk about anything but money, drink and gambling, add depth and detail to the bald statement in her autobiography of her loneliness and frustration. But her education also became her first personal financial resource. Spence had left Scotland with a testimonial from Miss Phinn saying that ‘from the time you could put three letters together, you evinced a turn for teaching – so clear-headed and patient, so thoroughly upright in word and deed’. 46 On board the Palmyra, she gathered up the younger children and gave them lessons. 47 But when first in Adelaide she found Miss Phinn’s recommendation outweighed by her youth and shyness. The nearest she came to teaching during her first years in the colony was her story-telling to the young Stirlings and young Bakewells, an activity she considered educational, perhaps for them, certainly for herself. 48 But her wish to find work as a teacher prob- 32
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Published in Adelaide by University
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Page 38 and 39: Introduction In November 1839 a pas
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1 Acquiring a room of her own Unbri
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Bibliography The most comprehensive
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Bibliography ‘The Dignity of Labo
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Bibliography -, notebook containing
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Bibliography Woman Suffrage League
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Bibliography Remains of the late Th
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Bibliography Wadham, E.J., Women’
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Bibliography Barbalet, Margaret, Fa
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Bibliography Notestein, Wallace, Th
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Index Electronic Index: this book i
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Downer, J. W., 35 Droop, H. R., 133
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Lubbock, Sir John, 133 Ludlow, J. M
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South Australian Political Associat
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