Elizabeth Webby

One of Patrick White’s working notebooks, acquired by the National Library of Australia in 2006, is almost exclusively devoted to material related to his breakthrough…

Locating Australian Literary Memory begins with a typically pithy quotation from Miles Franklin about its subject matter: ‘Such monuments alas, too often are a saving…

Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy, by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver. Sydney University Press, 2017.

With the growing interest in the history of the book, the extensive Angus & Robertson archive, now held at the State Library of NSW, has…

Remembering Patrick White: Contemporary Critical Essays includes twelve essays based on papers delivered at a symposium of the same title, held in Sydney in May…

The article explores the tastes and values of late-nineteenth-century reading groups and societies in Hobart, Sydney and Adelaide, and of their interest (or lack thereof)…

Webby presents a detailed analysis of the first two Australian volumes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

Places My Brilliant Career in the wider context of late nineteenth century Australian writing and literary cultures, examining its position in the Australian literary canon…

Bibliographies, indexes, finding lists—essential tools for the literary scholar and cultural historian, but ones often lacking for Australian material. The three works reviewed here represent…

In the past, drama has been something of the Cinderella among Australia's literary genres. In nationalist constructions of of literary history, for example, poetry and…

Discusses the influence Richardson's reading of her parents' romantic letters may have had on the composition of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

It is fascinating to watch the ebbs and flows of the reputations of various Australian writers Someone like Douglas Stewart, for example, for years so…

Between them, these four books indicate something of the present widening range of Australian literary studies. Our writers, especially our novelists, are attracting increasing attention…

Margaret Williams' book has been subtitled 'an historical entertainment in six acts'. Its format—quarto size, large print, generous margins, plentiful illustrations—seems designed for the coffee…

As every writing on or of short fiction knows, beginnings and endings are vital. The boundaries of this critical outline of twentieth-century Australian short fiction…

Webby reviews the following books:

The Extra by Hal Porter (Thomas Nelson Australia Limited. Melbourne, 1975).

An Autobiography by Catherine Helen Spence (W.K. Thomas &amp…

Hadgraft and Webby account for the legend of Fisher's Ghost, which has its origins in the murder of farmer Frederick Fisher in Campbell Town on…