Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
recalled, ‘that though Australia was to be a great country there was no market for
literary work, and the handicap of distance from the reading world was great’. 34 She
tried to overcome the distance by setting long sections of Mr Hogarth’s Will and The
Author’s Daughter in Britain, and most of Handfasted in an imaginary hidden valley
in America. She tried to woo the colonial market by extending the sphere of society
she depicted to include a peer of the realm in The Author’s Daughter, and the station
hands and a pair of dissolute and murderous gentlemen in Gathered In. But she
refused to join those novelists whose work was to become part of the legend of the
1890s by writing an ‘offensively Australian’ novel. 35 She thought that ‘the specialism
which … has invaded fiction’ meant that ‘In modern novels provincialism seems to
have run a little mad’. 36 She considered the dominance in Australian writing of
the ‘deadbeat’ – the remittance man, the gaunt shepherd with his starving
flocks and herds, the free selector on an arid patch, the drink shanty
where the rouseabouts and shearers knock down their cheques, the race
meeting where high and low, rich and poor, are filled with the gambler’s
ill luck –
as ‘false in the impression they make on the outside world and on ourselves’. Better
she believed, ‘to see Australia steadily and see it whole’. 37
That view, expressed in 1902, suggests why Spence’s novels have met treatment
at the hands of Australia’s men of letters as unappreciative as their treatment by her
publishers. ‘Provincialism’ can be found as readily in relation to the separate spheres
of women and men as in geographical chauvinism. It is only because, as Simone de
Beauvoir observed, men describe the world from their own point of view, which
they confuse with absolute truth, that such provincialism is not recognised more
often. 38 Novel-writing may have been the line of least resistance to a woman trying
to make her living, but writing novels that did not depict the favoured subjects
brought Spence straight up against a brick wall. When seeking a publisher in Sydney,
she was assured that ‘the only novels worth publishing in Australia were sporting or
political novels’. 39 Those to which the critics have awarded places in the Great Tradition
of Australian Fiction were, likewise, those concerned with the public sphere and
predominantly masculine adventures and heroics. Read by the same people in the
same way, Spence’s novels could only gain, at best, negative approval. It is striking
that even Sinnett’s enthusiasm is chiefly for what Clara Morison is not, rather than
for what the book does. As Susan Sheridan wrote recently:
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