Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Acquiring a room of her own
This smacks of an oft-told tale, with deliberate cheeriness calculated to prohibit
probing. Gossip preserved by families of early South Australians identifies the young
man as James Allen, an energetic newspaperman who had edited the Adelaide Times
during the 1840s. He was known to some of the pioneering colonists as ‘Dismal
Jimmy’, probably because of his unpaid labour in the pulpit of the Ebenezer Baptist
Church in North Adelaide. 74 The gossip also relates that when he engaged himself
to marry only six weeks after proposing to Miss Spence, she was furious. This cannot,
now, be anything but speculation. Spence’s own account suggests something
close to despair engendered by her religion. It also suggests that the triumphant independence
she had just achieved, by beginning to earn her own income, made her
reluctant to sacrifice that to become anyone’s wife, no matter how stimulating the
arguments they might have.
The second proposal was made to her when she was 23, by John Alexander Gilfillan,
an artist of 55, and a widower with three children. 75 She did not give any reasons
for refusing this offer. Her novels suggest two. Margaret Elliot, the self-portrait
she drew in her first novel (Clara Morison), refers casually to having had two offers,
one from a man who thought she had a noble soul, and remarks scornfully that she
did not think that much of a reason for marriage. In her fourth novel (The Author’s
Daughter) three of the characters express horror at the prospect of the heroine (Amy)
marrying ‘that old man’ (Lord Darlington). Their repeated assertions that such a
marriage would be ‘unnatural’ suggest that Spence recognised the importance of
sexual compatibility in domestic harmony, and, considered it impossible if there was
a great difference in the ages of the partners.
More simply, she may have refused both men because she did not love them. In
her autobiography, she observed:
I believe that if I had been in love, especially if I had been disappointed
in love, my novels would have been stronger and more interesting; but I
kept watch over myself, which I felt I needed, for I was both imaginative
and affectionate. I did not want to give my heart away. I did not desire a
love disappointment, even for the sake of experience. 76
Yet, after reading the diary that she kept intermittently at the beginning of the 1850s,
Jeanne Young considered that Spence may have ‘kept a watch’ over her affections at
some cost to her peace of mind. She noted that ‘From passages in her diary, love affairs
to be completed by the happiness of marriage seem not to have been so remote
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