No cause for optimism

Shifting allegiances in Eleanor Dark’s work

Susan Sheridan

Middlebrow Modernism: Eleanor Dark’s interwar fiction

by Melinda J. Cooper Sydney University Press

$45 pb, 288 pp

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in Eleanor Dark (1901–85), which singles her out from the group of women who dominated the Australian literary scene in the 1930s and 1940s, and attends to the literary significance as well as the political and historical contexts of her work. While Miles Franklin and Katharine Susannah Prichard have been the subject of massive biographies, there have been no major critical studies of their writing. Their contemporaries such as Nettie Palmer, Jean Devanny, M. Barnard Eldershaw, and Dymphna Cusack have fallen out of sight. But since the publication of Eleanor Dark: A writer’s life by Barbara Brooks in 1998, there has been a steady stream of essays and book chapters, a special issue of the journal Hecate, a second biography, and now a critical monograph on the work of this novelist.

As well as the intrinsic interest of Dark’s ten novels, the establishment of a writers’ retreat at her former home Varuna, in the Blue Mountains, has no doubt contributed to this upsurge of attention. A further factor has been the re-emergence of modernism and modernity as key issues in literary studies, and a concern to reposition the study of Australian literature outside a nationalist paradigm so as to enter more fully into this transnational conversation.

This is the context of Melinda Cooper’s scholarly study of the ‘middlebrow modernism’ of Dark’s interwar novels. This apparently contradictory term signals its thesis that Dark ‘repackaged experimental devices and progressive ideas in accessible and entertaining stories’ that ‘provided readers with a winning combination of both quality and entertainment’. Middlebrow Modernism focuses more on the ideas than on readers’ reception of the novels, with chapters offering an extended analysis of each of Dark’s first six titles.

Eleanor Dark was born in Sydney in the year of Federation: a ‘modern girl’. Her father, Dowell O’Reilly, was known as a writer as well as an advocate of women’s suffrage, and her education encouraged creative as well as scholastic and sporting achievements. On leaving school, Dark set herself an apprenticeship in writing magazine stories. Cooper’s discussion of these stories suggests that the young writer made free use of romantic conventions to explore the optimistic possibilities that modern life opened up to women. They led to Dark’s first published novel, Slow Dawning (1932), whose heroine is a young woman struggling to establish her first medical practice and assert her right to an independent life in a country town in the 1920s. Quintessentially modern in its focus on female independence, but stylistically conventional, this novel was later disowned by its author as she strove to establish herself as a serious writer.

By the time Slow Dawning appeared, some years after its composition, Eleanor had been married for a decade to Eric Dark, a doctor who was a veteran of World War I. They lived in Katoomba with their son, Michael, and Eric’s son by his first marriage. Eleanor’s outlook on life was changing, as was her husband’s. With the onset of the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and the threat of war in Europe, the Darks came to share a commitment to socialist humanism. Eric wrote about health and social justice, and Eleanor was active in combating censorship with the Fellowship of Australian Writers.

Her novels of the 1930s followed Slow Dawning in rapid succession: Prelude to Christopher (1934), Return to Coolami (1936), Sun Across the Sky (1937), Waterway (1938). These novels extended her initial interest in marriages and small communities, but involved wider circles of characters and conflicts of social class and political allegiance, engaging with current social and political ideas. Modernity was no longer cause for optimism.

What makes these novels distinctively modernist is the mode of writing: its focus on the characters’ inner lives, their emotions, sensations, dream states, and differing perspectives. In Waterway, for instance, a group of characters – ranging from an ageing professor to a group of children, from the local doctor to a radical journalist to an unemployed working-class man, from an abused wife to an idle socialite – all live at Watsons Bay. Their various lives are disrupted, on a single day, by a demonstration against unemployment in the city and a fatal ferry accident on the journey home.

It seems that for Dark this novel, with its harbour setting and epigraphs taken from early colonial historical records, set her on the path to the historical trilogy inaugurated in 1941 with The Timeless Land, her best-known work. While Waterway’s glance at Sydney’s past makes no mention of the original inhabitants, The Timeless Land sets itself the challenge of creating Aboriginal characters and imagining their reactions to the arrival of the invaders.

Cooper includes it in her study of the interwar fiction because it shows up both the power and the problems raised by ‘Dark’s liberal humanist vision and middlebrow modernist aesthetics’. She demonstrates the appropriation involved in modernist primitivism, that envisaged ‘an indigenised settler community’ that would draw strength from the very culture that it was in the process of destroying.

While it is good to see Dark treated as a writer seriously engaged with ideas, and as part of a wider, and more widely defined, modernist movement, I am baffled by the attractions of the category of ‘middlebrow’. This belittling epithet surely belongs in the 1920s, its point of origin. It was revived in recent years as a way of rescuing writers, mainly women, who were not deemed to measure up to the exacting standards of experimental modernism. It has been used, too, to characterise aspects of publishing. But as a central critical term in accounting for Dark’s distinctive qualities as a writer? I am less than fully convinced. g