Gabrielle Carey

James Joyce once famously said that if it took him seventeen years to write Finnegans Wake, then a reader should take seventeen years to read it. In his usual prophetic way, he turned out to be exactly right.

I am not certain that Elizabeth von Arnim remembered her Australian beginnings but neither am I convinced that she had forgotten them altogether.

The truth is that there would be no Joyce without the three women who supported him: Nora, his life-long partner, Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of Ulysses, and Harriet Shaw Weaver, his benefactor. Lover, publisher and salary provider. Chance furnished him with exactly what he needed. So he certainly doesn’t need another handmaiden in the form of a small-time Australian essayist. But for some reason, I need him.

‘It was the day that Seamus Heaney died: August 30, 2013. I hadn’t seen John Clarke since the late 1970s.’

If women remain hidden, or hide themselves, how are those who follow to find the stories in which they blaze a trail through oceans, or support themselves and their family with literary success? As Clode writes, ‘Stories construct the mythologies of our history, help us to understand our present circumstances and illuminate the possibilities of the future. If we cannot see ourselves in stories, how can we imagine ourselves creating new ones?’ This is not, I expect, a conundrum that can ever be resolved, and one of the great pleasures of these books is the ways in which their authors fill in the blanks.

One of the most intriguing – and largely unanswered – questions posed by Carey in Moving Among Strangers is: ‘Why did my mother correspond with a young man, an adolescent, thirteen years her junior, who wasn’t even a relation?’ Perhaps, she muses, they both felt like outsiders in the West Australian community.