If you love Australian literature, this book is a must-read. Friends and Rivals, Four Great Australian Writers by preeminent biographer Brenda Niall consists of four biographies of women who put Australian writing 'on the map.' Of the four — Barbara Baynton, Ethel Turner, Nettie Palmer, Henry Handel Richardson — the only one I haven't read is Ethel Turner: I didn't have an Australian childhood so I never read Seven Little Australians (1894) which written so casually, has an extraordinary place in Australian literary history. It redefined Australia's relationship with English publishers who had not until then taken Australian writing seriously.

Conventional, conservative Ethel Turner crossed paths with flamboyant, ebullient Barbara Baynton in 1896 when they were both writing for The Bulletin, but Niall begins Ethel Turner's chapter with their meeting in 1911 when Barbara helped Ethel to choose an emerald ring. Herbert Curlewis couldn't afford more than an unspectacular engagement ring when he courted Ethel, but by 1911 he wanted her to have something finer, and it was Barbara to whom Ethel turned to help her find the prettiest ring in Sydney. The friendship was surprising, because the women had very different temperaments, but they had bonded over their charitable work as patrons and fundraisers for the Ashfield Infants' Home which provided shelter and support for unmarried mothers. Although they were both now affluent and confident about their place in Sydney society, they had both experienced the plight of the single mother or the deserted wife:

Baynton's struggle to keep three young children without a father's support matched the heroic efforts of Turner's mother, left with three small daughters. (p.15)

It is small, intimate insights like this episode with the ring that make reading this book such a pleasure. It's fascinating to read the story of Turner's turbulent childhood and the way she remade herself as a society lady. She was ambitious, but Niall says that her success with Seven Little Australians constrained her development as a writer. She became known as a children's author, partly on the advice of Louise Mack who told her that drafts of the children's book 'wasn't half-bad' and she should finish it instead of working on her 'serious novel'. Sales of Seven Little Australians made her publisher want more, and she surrendered to the tyranny of the sequel.

...Ethel Turner's success was immense; her output prodigious; her life generously lived.

There was a cost. Although Turner wrote fluently, met deadlines with strict professionalism and could devise a new plot outline before breakfast, she was a victim of her own efficiency. She revelled in her popular and commercial success but fretted at the constraints of the genre in which she did best. (p.56)

Alas, whatever gratitude she may have owed to Louise evaporated when Mack published a gossipy novel with a central character of limited talent who seemed a lot like Ethel Turner. The friendship couldn't survive the failure of trust. Yet when Louise died of a stroke at 67, Ethel gathered flowers from her own garden to take to the funeral and sent kind thoughts to Louise's family. (I hope I remember this when I finally get round to reading Mack's An Australian Girl in London, on the TBR.)

You can read what I gleaned from the introduction to the Sydney University Press edition of Bush Studies here but what I didn't realise then was that as late as the 1970s the true story was unknown. Prior to that, readers were baffled by a rich and arrogant socialite being able to write so vivdly about the poverty of bush life.

Thea Astley, who found the dominant theme in the six stories published as Bush Studies to be 'an expression of revolt against the feudal conditions of women in the bush' was perplexed by their coming from an author who was 'comfortably off.' Astley could see no connection between the privileged Baynton of the public record and the brutishness and horror that pervades her fictional world. (p.91)

Indeed. And it transpires that we owe Bush Studies to the writer and critic Edward Garnett, who, as a reader at Duckworth's saved it from the slush pile to which other publishers had consigned it. This vignette about the (not quite) unsung hero Garnett is fascinating too:

Like his wife, [the prolific translator] Constance Garnett, he had a passion for Russian literature. His work enriched English literature in unexpected ways. He was the discoverer and patron of Joseph Conrad, the Polish master mariner, and D H Lawrence, the brash young man from the Midlands who wrote about sex with shocking frankness. Garnett was always hoping for 'the delighted flash of recognition', when, 'amid the mass of trivial, indifferent, or heavily conscientious efforts a beginner's work [showed] that instinctive creative originality which we call genius.' He believed he had found that quality in Baynton's strange, disturbing stories. (p.97)

Yes, let's have a shout-out for all the publishers' readers ploughing through the MSS to find the wonderful books we love to read!

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/06/22/friends-and-rivals-four-great-australian-wri... ( )