Exiles at Home was one of those books that was prominent in the 1980s, but although I read iconic feminist texts like The Female Eunuch, The Feminine Mystique, and The Second Sex, and almost all the novels I read in the 1980s were by women, I never got round to reading this survey of Australian women writers in the interwar period. What prompted me to buy a Kindle edition now, (for the princely sum of $AUD3.99!) was my reading of Eleanor Dark's 1934 Prelude to Christopher. I wanted to know more about its place in the history of modernist literature in Australia.

Alas, while Exiles at Home is interesting enough, it didn't help much with that. Modjeska, IMO, misrepresented Dark's novel as dealing with ‘women’s experience’, because it focussed on maternity and the psychology of motherhood (Loc 4458). Though I'm prepared to concede that perhaps today's greater awareness of mental health has influenced my opinion, I don't think that was the novel's major focus at all. As you can see in my review, I thought that Dark was primarily interested in how the mental health of her central character was always under question (because she was a woman who had been gaslighted) yet the collective madness of WW1 and the hysteria that surrounded it, was never questioned.

Exiles at Home is, as Judy Turner wrote in the first paragraph of her (paywalled) 1982 review for the ABR, primarily a political history of women's writing in the 1920s and 1930s. It barely mentions the literary qualities of these women's writing, because Modjeska was interested in feminist politics rather than literary developments. It ascribes the biggest influence on these writers to the conservative, nationalist Australian critic Nettie Palmer.

Exiles at Home is a fascinating work by a feminist of the 1970s about a group of anti-fascist feminists of the 1920s and 1930s. From it we learn as much about the world view of the author as we do about the politics of its subjects. A serious book, about serious writers, it examines novels for their historical rather than for their literary interest. It offers no real criticism of writing styles, and no comparison with modern feminist authors. Nor is it a book to be read in the hope of rediscovering almost forgotten characters from our literary past.

Perhaps like Judy Turner whose words imply discontent, I wanted this book to be more than it was. I wanted literary criticism of women writers which certainly at the time was in short supply if the reference books I have are anything to go by. But what Modjeska delivers instead is an assertion of the significance of women writers in the interwar years. Which makes it all the more obvious that the token literary criticism there that there was, had failed to grasp a significant literary movement. She interrogates women's fiction to see if they were writing about political issues that affect women rather than just the 'domestic' issues that marginalised women's fiction for so long. Part of that was redefining what 'domestic' issues are...

[Would anyone today suggest that Eleanor Dark's exposure of the way women experienced mental health services in Prelude to Christopher, was a 'domestic issue'?]

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/02/01/exiles-at-home-australian-women-writers-1925... ( )

A fascinating account of a network of Australian women and their interactions with the cultural and political crises of their time.

Drusilla Modjeska has written an unusual book about women struggling to be writers in a changing and challenging time in Australian history. This is not a book with a series of chapters about different women and the literary contributions of each. Although Modjeska gives us such information, her focus is on the interactions within which a group of woman writers and the social political environment in which they were heard. According to Modjeska, the women were a dominant voice in Australian literature. Yet as women they faced particular problems in both their private and public lives–problems many of us today face as we seek to combine families, responsibilities and careers.

Read more: http://wp.me/p24OK2-1pt ( )