Helen Garner’s work occupies a privileged position within Australian letters. She has attracted significant popularity, critical acclaim and increasing academic interest, having won the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2006 and the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize in 2016 for her non-fiction. She was ranked eighth, the highest literary writer, in a 2005 Sydney Morning Herald poll of ‘Australia’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals’. She is the subject of an Oxford University Press monograph by Kerryn Goldsworthy, and a more recent biography by Bernadette Brennan. Her book The First Stone (1995) threatened her popularity within a literary and academic culture sympathetic to the ideals of an emergent third-wave feminism. However, in recent years with the publication of less controversial works such as The Spare Room (2008), her collected non-fiction writings, and short stories, her reputation as a beloved Australian literary icon has been cemented.
The focus of this particular reading of…