Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

The line of least resistance
not to ask John Spence to comment on her fiction until the work was complete.
With the encouragement of a friendly neighbour, to whom she read each chapter as
she finished it, she concluded the whole novel in time to despatch it with her friend
John Taylor as he set off for a holiday in England and France, asking him to submit
it to Smith, Elder of London and ‘to say nothing to anybody about it’. 14 While she
waited to hear the fate of that manuscript she began another. The first, Clara Morison,
was published in 1854; the second, Tender and True, in 1856.
That first burst was followed by another eight years later, in the mid-1860s. Her
third novel, Mr Hogarth’s Will, serialised in the Weekly Mail as Uphill Work during
1864, was published in 1865. 15 Her fourth, Hugh Lindsay’s Guest, appeared in serial
form in the Adelaide Observer during 1867, then as The Author’s Daughter in 1868.
She did not write any more extended fiction after that until the late 1870s, when she
produced Gathered In in time for Emily Clark to take it on a fruitless search for an
English publisher in 1878. That novel was serialised in the Adelaide Observer from
September 1881 to March 1882; it was not published in book form until almost a
century later, in 1977. 16 At the same time as she was writing that work, she must
have been writing the short story ‘Afloat or Ashore’, published in the Australasian
in 1878. She submitted her sixth novel, Handfasted for a competition run by the
Sunday Mail, but unsuccessfully. That book was not published until 1984. 17 Her
last piece of extended fiction, a long short story called ‘A Week in the Future’ was
serialised in the Centennial Magazine in 1888-9, then published as a slender volume
in 1889. By that time, Spence was in her 60s: her mother had died two years earlier,
removing from her a major constraint on her desire to make a more direct intervention
in the world of men.
It says much about her sense of vocation as a novelist, and the support she found
in knowing that she participated in a cosmopolitan world of women writers, that she
continued writing fiction for so long. It says much, too, about the strength of her
sense of domestic responsibility and of the perils of venturing outside the domestic
sphere, that she persisted in writing fiction at all. The tale of her negotiations with
her publishers is a sorry one. Smith, Elder & Company refused Clara Morison. Their
chief reader, the same William Smith Williams who had declined Charlotte Brontë’s
novel The Professor, wrote Spence a letter similar to the one he had sent Brontë saying
that he thought she could do better. 18 John Taylor left the manuscript with another
of Spence’s Australian friends in London, William Bakewell. He wrote a preface
for it and arranged its publication in two volumes, for which Spence was to receive
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