Gender and sexuality

‘What is a feminist book? And what are feminist books for? I pose these questions at a time when feminism is currently popular enough to yield bestsellers and when any feminist text, no matter how broadly or narrowly pitched, has to compete with a bottomless supply of high-quality feminist writing available for free on the internet. ‘

Feminist books pitched to a broad audience, whatever their contents, inevitably face the same criticism: okay, what are the solutions then? This charge could be levelled at Ford’s book, in which apart from the injunction to ‘fight like a girl’, hearty encouragement to masturbate as often as you desire and to find a good girl gang, does not offer much in way of a roadmap forward. Certainly, it would have been illuminating to read about feminist campaigns that need more attention and support and to introduce readers to some impressive feminist thinkers who deserve a wider audience. Yet this criticism also strikes me as a little beside the point. The authors of feminist blockbusters have always been better at diagnosis than they have at cure and such books are still necessary, including to help prompt the ‘light-bulb’ of recognition that moves feminist identification along.

Three new Australian titles from debut novelists prompt just such a consideration of the connection between monumental and historical time, and its relationship to femininity. All three novels bestow a value and significance on women’s experience across two centuries: from the early penal settlement of Van Diemen’s Land in Jennifer Livett’s Wild Island to the ferocious and tragic friendship of two girls at the foot of a lighthouse in Kate Mildenhall’s Skylarking, and a pianist’s entrapment within an Oxford terrace from the 1950s to the present day in Zoë Morrison’s Music and Freedom. These novels all consider the domestic, with a weightiness given to private scenes and the interior – and alongside this, a feeling of movement, of an unsettled and unmoored female independence. Far away from the colonial centre, a certain wildness and abandon comes to the fore.

What I missed in labeling Miss Spence a campaigner first and a novelist as an afterthought was that her primary ambition was as a writer. It was only after her writing failed to find an audience that she moved away from it toward journalism and lecturing. My experience with her novels is typical. There’s a silence around reading nineteenth-century women writers – not many people do it and if they do they are most likely specialists on Spence and her founding role in the history of Australian feminism.

It’s November, 2004. I’m sitting in one of the elegant reading rooms of the British Library, gazing at rows of readers bent to their books at long wooden tables, their hair illuminated by the glow of desk lamps. The ceilings are high above my head, the woodwork panelling of the walls rich and dark. I am tired, my head groggy. I moved to London two months before with a suitcase and a scholarship to study expatriate Australian writers, but I sometimes feel like I can’t wake from a bad dream.

Barbara Baynton’s book of short stories, Bush Studies, has fascinated me for years, because there’s so much that is deceptive, as well as utterly transgressive, about it. Written at the very end of the nineteenth century, the stories within it are mostly delivered in a deadpan narration that means the violence at their centre often builds so quietly and subtly that their eruption is as shocking as it is brutal.

‘Re-reading Wide Sargasso Sea now in this, the fiftieth anniversary year of its first publication in 1966, I can’t help feeling that the novel remains just as groundbreaking and heartbreaking. Perhaps we are finally catching up with Jean Rhys and celebrating – with her, despite her – the unequivocal achievement of Wide Sargasso Sea.’

‘Already a substantial Eliot arts industry exists, ranging from academe to television, and now appear yet more books on this fascinating Victorian subject, both acts of hommage. Two very different women, journalist Rebecca Mead and academic/novelist Patricia Duncker, united by their enthusiasm for Eliot’s writing, engage with the giantess of Victorian letters. They follow in a tradition of Eliot readers, whose involvement in the texts created a broad church of worshipping fandom, something apparent in her lifetime.’

After publishing five or six of these books, I realised they had something in common. Yes they were all written by women – yes they were all written in the first person – and like practically all books and films of their time, they included writing about sex. (Since these first-person narratives were written by women, this necessarily meant that the books included narrative first-person writing about sex by a woman, a fact that tended to obscure practically everything else, but more on this later.)

Australia’s first female Prime Minister is the figure at the centre of this pile of books, and they were all produced during the last few months of her Prime Ministership. They came out in quick succession… all of them had gone to press before the afternoon of June 26 when Prime Minister Julia Gillard called the leadership spill that saw the federal ALP caucus vote her out of office in favour of Kevin Rudd.