Review of Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making Their Mark, by Susan Sheridan

Abstract

Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making Their Mark itself marks and builds on a robust tradition of scholarship on the gendered cultural history of Australia, including Susan Sheridan's earlier, pioneering studies of the contribution of women writers and readers to the formation of modern Australia. It also provides a welcome contribution to current conversations about the larger contexts of Australian literary production and reception, detailing some of the ways that Australian literature has been bound up in larger- global, colonial, transnational—as well as smaller and more precise—local, regional—literary and cultural frames. It brings together a list of writers whose intellectual and cultural significance is now undisputed—Dorothy Auchterlonie Green, Rosemary Dobson, Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley, Gwen Harwood, Amy Witting, Judith Wright, Dorothy Hewett, Jessica Anderson—and traces the shifting connections and divergences across their experiences of writing and publishing in Australia in the decades since the 1950s. More minutely, it provides an important reminder of the diverse asymmetries and inequities bearing on writing as a profession, through its attentive account of the signal experiences of Australian women working at writing and travelling, being edited, published, read and reviewed in the post-war decades.