Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography by Jill Roe - guest reviewer Yvonne Perkins

Today's guest post is by historian Yvonne Perkins. Yvonne is a dedicated reviewer for the AWW challenge, mainly in the areas of history, memoir and biography.  She has just published a review of Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography by Jill Roe. Here she introduces the work to AWW readers, lists reviews of Franklin's work that have been written for the challenge so far, and suggests other titles which could be reviewed. Yvonne's own review can be found on her website, Stumbling Through the Past.

Yvonne Perkins writes:
Jill Roe's biography of Miles Franklin is an important book for Australian Women Writers Challenge. Miles Franklin is one of the most influential Australian female writers in our history, both through her own writing and her encouragement of Australian writers. Who was this person who is such an important part of our literary heritage? Roe's life of Miles Franklin is an entree into the world of Australian literature of the first half of the twentieth century. My reading notes are dotted with "I must read xxx".

Jill Roe has produced an excellent biography. She has skilfully managed the large volume of sources available to her and written a book which is enjoyable to read. Few would dare to undertake such a comprehensive biography; others would be swamped by the sources. Roe recognised that Miles Franklin was the kind of person who could sustain a lengthy biography. She was a complex person who sought out what life could offer.

I hope that my review of Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography will prompt others to read and review this book. In a little under 1500 words there was so much that my review didn't address. Perhaps other reviewers could discuss Jill Roe's treatment of Miles Franklin's literary legacy or how gender issues affected Miles Franklin's life. Diversity of opinion is an important part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge. I thought that this biography was well constructed - did you?

Some reviewers for the Challenge this year have already reviewed Miles Franklin's novels (see below). I have mentioned some of her more well known published work in my review and there are others that may interest you.

The anniversary of the birth of Miles Franklin is on 14th October. Perhaps reviewers could mark this date by publishing a review of her biography or her published work? Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography was published in 2008, so some of the Australian Women Writers Challenge reviewers may have already reviewed this book prior to 2012. If so, could you please add a link to your review in the comments below.

AWW2012 Reviews of Miles Franklin's Writing

• My Brilliant Career: Reviewed by Jessie, Lucy Graham.  
• My Career Goes Bung: Reviewed by David Goldman. 

Some Other Miles Franklin Books
In addition to the books above you may wish to review:

• Franklin's books published under the pseudonym Brent of Bin Bin - Up the Country: A Tale of the Early Australian Squattocracy; Ten Creeks Run: A Tale of the Horse and Cattle Stations of the Upper Murrumbidgee; Back to Bool Bool: A Ramiparous Novel with Several Prominent Characters and a Hantle of Others Disposed as the Atolls of Oceania's Archipelagoes; Prelude to Waking: A Novel in the First Person and Parentheses; Cockatoos: A Story of Youth and Exodists; Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang: A Tale of the Jumbuck Pads on the Summer Runs 
• All that Swagger. 
• Written with Kate Baker - Joseph Furphy: The Legend of a Man and his Book. 
• Laughter, Not for a Cage: Notes on Australian Writing, with Biographical Emphasis on the Struggles, Function, and Achievements of the Novel in Three Half-centuries. 
• Childhood at Brindabella: My First Ten Years 
• On Dearborn Street 

[End post]

Read Yvonne's review of Jill Roe's biography of Stella Miles Franklin here.


About: Since completing her degree in history at the University of Sydney Yvonne Perkins has worked on a number of historical research projects, most recently an investigation of the history of teaching reading in Australia. Currently she is researching the beliefs, religious or otherwise, of soldiers who served in World War I.

In her spare time Yvonne explores issues in history on her blog, Stumbling Through the Past.  She is passionate about promoting the excellent work produced by Australian historians which is influencing people around the world.

WTF is ‘women’s fiction’?!

Today's guest author contributor is Paddy O'Reilly. Paddy’s debut novel, The Factory, was listed among the best books of the year in 2007 in the Australian Book Review and the Sydney Morning Herald, and performed as the Radio National Book Reading in 2009. Her latest novel, The Fine Colour of Rust , was released earlier this year in Australia and the UK, and comes out in the USA on September 4. She'll be talking about various kinds of fiction at the Melbourne Writers Festival from August 25.

Paddy writes:

When Elizabeth Lhuede asked me to write about why I wouldn’t want my book classified as ‘women’s fiction,’ my first thought was that I don’t actually know what the classification ‘women’s fiction’ means. I know the publishing and bookselling industries use it for marketing. And yet having my work categorised that way would make me very uncomfortable indeed. It feels dismissive. It feels like being shunted off into the section of the bookshop set aside for trivialities. It feels, in fact, like a throwback term, something that would have been used in the time when a woman’s place was supposed to be in the kitchen, reading her lovely unthreatening ‘women’s fiction’ once the house had been made all spick and span and the scones were rising in the oven.

What is ‘women’s fiction’ anyway? Unlike crime or romance or SF, it isn’t a genre with identifiable characteristics and conventions.

           Is it writing for women?

           Is it writing about women?

           Is it writing by women?

I asked a few fellow writers for their thoughts about the term ‘women’s fiction’. Here’s what they said.

• My understanding is that men don’t read fiction much these days, but women still do. (Is that right?) In which case nearly all fiction is women’s fiction.
• If there’s any such thing, it’s fiction about a female protagonist, written by a woman, that women want to read (and possibly men, too). Apart from that, it could be any genre, any style and about anything at all. 
• ‘Writing by women’ is nice, ‘women’s fiction’ not - it has an unhelpful air of relegation in terms of readers or subject matter or level. 
• On reflection I think women’s fiction is an irritating term. We have fiction about women. We have fiction by women. These are just statements of fact (and fiction about women is not necessarily by women, and vice versa.) But women’s fiction... that’s not fact, that’s someone’s judgement call. (It will suit women, it’s about women’s issues - relationships, parenting, etc, as if men don’t take part in those parts of life.) And it’s way too broad. I hate books about shopping and dating. I love books that examine relationships and family. And both those types of books are called women’s fiction. More ghettoising. 
• Women readers do seek out ‘women’s fiction’, whatever that means to them. It doesn’t mean it has to be confined to any particular type of writing, though. (And women also seek out other things to read.) But others (critics, prize judges, lit editors, possibly even booksellers) think it means commercial fiction about domestic life or about relationships with men and family members – like that’s a bad thing. So it’s really not a very helpful term in any way. 
• If I think of women’s fiction at all it would be as an offshoot of popular fiction and would include Mills and Boon, superficial romances and novels involving much shopping for products with trendy names. I recall a genre called ‘sex and shopping’, definitely women only stuff. I imagine it’s a useful category for marketing and shelving books. Readers of literary fiction might use the term derisively to show how intelligent they are. 
• There is no such category as ‘Men’s Fiction’ that I know of in the mainstream, so that would indicate that ‘Women’s Fiction’ is used to corral, marginalise and fence off the work by women from the mainstream. Do women writers themselves refer to their colleagues’ work as ‘Women’s Fiction’ – I seriously doubt it – so the question remains who uses this term and for what purpose? In the same way good writing has no gender, it is just good writing, only the author has a gender, which should not reflect on the quality of the work. 
• I’d be asking someone who uses it what she means by ‘women’s fiction’ – it’s usually only used in a demeaning way in my opinion

Meg Wolitzer, an American writer, also has a few thoughts on the topic.

‘...any lumping together of disparate writers by gender or perceived female subject matter separates the women from the men. And it subtly keeps female writers from finding a coed audience, not to mention from entering the larger, more influential playing field. It’s done all the time, and not just by strangers at parties or by various booksellers that have no trouble calling interesting, complex novels by women “Women’s Fiction,” as if men should have nothing to do with them. A writer’s own publisher can be part of a process of effective segregation and vague if unintentional put-down. Look at some of the jackets of novels by women. Laundry hanging on a line. A little girl in a field of wildflowers. A pair of shoes on a beach. An empty swing on the porch of an old yellow house.

'Compare these with the typeface-only jacket of Chad Harbach’s novel, “The Art of Fielding,” or the jumbo lettering on “The Corrections.” Such covers, according to a book publicist I spoke to, tell the readers, “This book is an event.”’ (You can read Wolitzer’s entire article here)

How tempting it is to write a book and give it the title ‘Women’s Fiction’. Then, to introduce a little cognitive dissonance, the cover must have large imposing lettering, and no pictures.

Why does it seem like that book would be ironic?

'Stella!!' - AWW tops 1000 reviews

This week the Australian Women Writers Challenge reached a milestone: over 1000 reviews have been linked to the site.

We should be celebrating, right?

Or should we?

Over at Meanjin last week, while discussing the progress of funding for The Stella Prize, Chris Flynn wrote: "Is it too late to predict contenders for the inaugural Stella Prize? Too late, I'm doing it."

Flynn proceeded to list 10 books of fiction released in 2012.

So far, six of these have been reviewed for AWW :

• Carrie Tiffany Mateship with Birds, reviewed by  Angela Meyer, Tony’s Reading List, Janine Rizzetti
• Deborah Robertson Sweet Old World, reviewed by  Lisa Walker, Angela Meyer, Whispering Gums
• Paddy O’Reilly The Fine Colour of Rust, reviewed by Kate Rizetti, Shelleyrae, Maree K, Helene Young, Jenny Schwarz, Lisa Walker, Angela Meyer
• Susan Johnson My Hundred Lovers, reviewed by  Jessica White, Marg
• Drusilla Modjeska The Mountain, reviewed by  Stephanie RIASS
• Romy Ash Floundering, reviewed by  Shambolic Living, Jon Page, Su Luus, Sian Campbell, Jessica White

Four of the ten have not.

It made me wonder to what extent the challenge has achieved what it set out to achieve: to help redress the gender imbalance of reviews in literary pages. Would these participants have read and reviewed the above books anyway?

What about the other books on Flynn's list? Any plans to read and review?

• Josephine Rowe Tarcutta Wake
• Toni Jordan Nine Days (forthcoming in September) 
• Chloe Hooper The Engagement 
• Michele De Kretser Questions of Travel