Marjorie Barnard (1897–1987)

Very strongly written short stories set mainly in 1940s Australia.The bulk of them treat the lives of women- a woman at the beauty parlor, getting a boost to take on her philandering husband and best friend; another woman who's bravely ended an affair with a "sensitive" married man, only to learn she was just one of many; one of a pair of spinster sisters gets a proposal of marriage in later life; a mother who's child has died makes a brave atrempt at hosting a Christmas party..
Others have a different POV: "Sunday" sees a young man making a dutiful visit , to the stilted, controlling, overfed and claustrophobic world of Home - we feel his mad need to escape. "Fighting in Vienna" sees an Austrian woman venturing out in wartime to buy birdseed; "One Bright Leaf" is set in a Norwegian family, bereft by war...
Quite superb.… (mais)

I would hesitate to call this book a history, but it is a narrative about the history of British settlement until World War 2. As such, it has several interesting aspects. It is a short book which tries to encompass all of the history of white settlement in Australia. This means it takes a long view, which leads it to some interesting conclusions (not necessarily backed up with evidence but as I mentioned this is not exactly history in the academic sense). The most interesting idea in the book is its notes on the effects of landscape on the national character. I will quote, as this is a rare-ish book:

"The continent took them and disciplined them, discarded some, moulded others. The discipline was passive and natural...the seasons, which depend on no symmetrical calendar, but on the uncertain incidence of dry spell and rain, the great distances, the loneliness of a land that cannot, for the most part, be closely settled, the monotone of the bush. These things, so large, so impersonal, so unescapable, moulded what they did not destroy...The dark people lived off the country by accepting its conditions. They conserved its resources by abstinence, by keeping their numbers low, by moving continually from food supply to food supply, never exhausting the country, never taking more than the natural tithe of the increase...Their adjustment was so complete, so intricate, so completely passed over into their legend and their unconscious mind that they, after thousands of years, had ceased to be interlopers, masters or slaves, and had become a part of the very soil's rhythym, their life a bush pattern".

The author doesn't go so far as to say that the destiny of European settlers in Australia will be to eventually follow indigenous ways. The book still assumes European superiority over the native people. There are two major changes to the traditional Australian way of life which have been brought in by European settlers. The first is the ability to import goods, species, people from outside the continent. The second, especially in the 20th century and beyond, is the use of technology to collapse the vast transportation and communication distances of the Australian continent and the consequent connection to (instead of isolation from) the wider world.

The author's prose is lyrical and concise; one can get something of an overview of European Australian history in a very short reading.… (mais)

The Stories in [The Persimmon Tree] are lean and purposeful. I was almost bowled over by the amount of anger and frustration electrifying several of them. Barnard's focus is on the meanness of 'bourgeois ambitions and aims, on the strangulation of the souls particularly of women and children, but also, by implication of men, acting under the conviction that appearances are, in fact, the substance of life. So a woman's dress is ruined on an important date and she won't come home to meet the man's mother - even though it is apparent this is a kind man and likely to be a decent husband to her; when the parakeets in a ladies lunchroom in a fashionable store steal the show from the orchestra, they must be 'sent back' to wherever they were rented from, too real, too insistent. There is the mousey seamstress who is served a really nasty piece of corned beef at lunch at work at her employers, while the daughter eats a juicy chop and the mother various appetizing things.... because she's feeling a bit delicate: "Mrs. Bowker's delicacy did not show however, unless it was in her habit of looking intently, and rather suspiciously at every piece of food before she took it on her plate." These stories reflect an era and a place and give a strong image of the pressures of life in Sydney and Australia generally in the middle of the last century. Although Barnard lived into the 1980's and kept writing, none of her stories reflect the social changes that began to blow away some of the worst of the conventions in the 1960's - I'm sorry she didn't tackle it, but perhaps she felt it was out of her own purview.

The descriptive writing is breathtaking - spare and sharp and penetrating. The last four or five stories seem a bit different, less grounded in physical place and more about the interior landscape of loss, mainly of children, although one is an imagining of a prolonged drought and relief that perhaps all life will be wiped out if only it lasts long enough.

One last word - SHAME ON YOU VIRAGO! This has to be one of the worst edited books I've ever encountered -- some pages have as many as three spelling and one or two punctuation errors. I've never seen this in a Virago book before. This copy came out in the '80's - all I can think is that someone was in a hurry and skipped a step with the galleys. Such a terrible thing to do to a fine writer.
Writing is **** Editing is *… (mais)

I found this collection of short stories to be very much to my taste. The writing is precise and feminine, which is appropriate since the narrators are women, and we are viewing different aspects of a woman's world. Barnard also uses sufficient detail to make the story concrete without letting too many descriptions hijack the stories. I actually love immersing myself in highly descriptive works, like Victorian literature, but in the short story format I value concise writing, unless the poetics of a piece is the point. Here, the characters are the focus. Barnard presents a range of scenarios, from a heart-broken young woman forced to listen to the merits of her secret ex-lover in polite conversation, to a little girl enduring the humiliating condescension of her rich and well-meaning, but entirely misguided, patrons. The internal conflict is poignant. Some of the tales have a happy, or at least optimistic, outlook, while others are tragic. A nice blend of stories that are real slice-of-life pieces. I would read more by Barnard should I come across them.… (mais)