Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
written by women’. By the 1860s, John Stuart Mill could reflect that ‘If women
lived in a different country from men, and had never read any of their writings,
they would have a literature of their own’. 3 Spence may well have formulated her
childhood’s ambition ‘to be a teacher first, and a great writer afterwards’ before she
knew anything of the women who had written fiction before her. But at about the
time that she first had a novel published she began to look to other writers who were
women. She ‘read and appreciated Jane Austen’s novels – those exquisite miniatures’;
towards the end of her life she observed, ‘so great a charm have Jane Austen’s books
that I have made a practice of reading them through regularly once a year’. 4 She
thought highly of the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 5 She wrote and spoke
of George Eliot and her admiration for her work, wondering at one time how Eliot
would have fared had she, like Spence, come to live in an Australian colony. 6 She regarded
the ‘poems and economic writings’ of Charlotte Perkins Gilman as an ‘inspiration’.
7 She saw her own life as similar to that of Margaret Oliphant, whose fiction
she liked. 8 In her later years she reviewed novels written by younger women as different
as her sister colonist Catherine Martin and the South African Olive Schreiner. 9
And she decided that she disliked the Australian Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies even
more than she had disliked meeting the book’s author. 10 If the novel was ‘the line of
least resistance’, then it was because Spence could draw support and encouragement
from knowing and approving the work of other women who, in the cosmopolitan
world of letters, were subverting the patriarchal dominion over culture by creating a
literature of their own.
However, even the mediated indirect public voice that women could find through
fiction was still contested in the mid-19 th century. The Poet Laureate, Robert Southey,
had told Charlotte Brontë that ‘Literature cannot be the business of women’s life
and it ought not to be’. 11 The Brontës published under masculine pseudonyms, and
we still know George Sand and George Eliot by theirs. And that was in Britain and
France. If the works which achieved print are any guide, there were no more than
four women attempting to write novels in all of colonial Australia at that time. 12 In
one of the rawest of its outposts, Catherine Spence must have felt entirely alone.
She began her first novel when she was 19 and was working as a governess, but
she never finished it. ‘My brother’s insistence on reading it every day as I wrote it’
she remembered ‘somehow made me see what poor stuff it was, and I did not go far
with it’. 13 Eight years later, she had given up teaching, had gained some experience in
journalism with occasional, anonymous contributions to the press, and had learned
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