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Fully documented lives

A daughter’s fond and intelligent book on her literary parents
by
July 2021, no. 433

A Paper Inheritance: The passionate literary lives of Leslie Rees and Coralie Clarke Rees by Dymphna Stella Rees

University of Queensland Press, $32.99 pb, 296 pp

Fully documented lives

A daughter’s fond and intelligent book on her literary parents
by
July 2021, no. 433
Leslie and Coralie Rees in the Blue Mountain, New South Wales, in 1956 (photograph taken by Dymphna Stella Rees)
Leslie and Coralie Rees in the Blue Mountain, New South Wales, in 1956 (photograph taken by Dymphna Stella Rees)

Coralie Clarke Rees and Leslie Rees are not remembered among the glamour couples of twentieth-century Australian literary life. Unlike George Johnston and Charmian Clift, Vance and Nettie Palmer, or their friends Darcy Niland and Ruth Park, neither of them wrote novels and they both spread their work across a range of genres. Critics, journalists, travel writers, children’s writers, playwrights, they devoted themselves to supporting the broad artistic culture of Australia rather than claiming its attention. Their lives were spent in juggling their literary interests with the need to make a living at a time when Australian society was even less supportive of writers than it is now. They made compromises to suburban life and the need to care for their two daughters, without ever abandoning their determination to live by the pen.

Susan Lever reviews 'A Paper Inheritance: The passionate literary lives of Leslie Rees and Coralie Clarke Rees' by Dymphna Stella Rees

A Paper Inheritance: The passionate literary lives of Leslie Rees and Coralie Clarke Rees

by Dymphna Stella Rees

University of Queensland Press, $32.99 pb, 296 pp

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