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Susan Sheridan

Susan Sheridan

Susan Sheridan FAHA is Emeritus Professor in the School of Humanities at Flinders University in Adelaide. Her latest book is The Fiction of Thea Astley (2016). Earlier books include: Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making Their Mark (2011), Christina Stead (1988), Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing 1880s to 1930s (1995), and Who Was That Woman? The Australian Women’s Weekly in the Postwar Years (2002); as editor, Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism (1988), Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s (1993) with Sue Rowley and Susan Magarey, and Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds (2006), with Paul Genoni.

Susan Sheridan reviews 'New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham' edited by Nathanael O’Reilly

April 2017, no. 390 30 March 2017
Rhymed verse is a wide netThrough which many subtleties escape.Nor would I take it to capture a strong thingSuch as a whale. This manifesto for free verse comes from a poet whose associates at the time included Harold Monro, Richard Aldington, and D.H. Lawrence in London, Harriet Monroe and Louis Untermeyer in New York, Natalie Clifford Barney in Paris. Anna Wickham (1883–1947) mixed with the m ... (read more)

Susan Sheridan reviews 'Call of the Outback' by Marianne van Velzen

April 2016, no. 380 24 March 2016
The long subtitle of this biography says it all. Hill was an immensely popular and influential travel writer in the 1930s and 1940s. Her books The Great Australian Loneliness (1937) and The Territory (1951) gathered together and built on the many stories she had written for city newspapers. She also published histories of the flying doctor medical service (Flying Doctor Calling, 1947) and of the d ... (read more)

Susan Sheridan reviews 'Australian Women War Reporters' by Jeannine Baker

January-February 2016, no. 378 21 December 2015
In this meticulously researched and eminently readable history, Jeannine Baker presents a gallery of impressive women who reported war news despite the obstacles put in their way by military authorities and press traditions alike. Along the way she deftly fills in key information about the conflicts involved, from the Boer War to Vietnam – a disturbing reminder of the extent to which Australia's ... (read more)

Susan Sheridan reviews 'The Women's Pages' by Debra Adelaide

November 2015, no. 376 28 October 2015
In this beautifully crafted novel, two parallel stories merge. Chapters alternate between Ellis, a young woman living in Sydney in the 1960s, and Dove, a thirty-eight-year-old woman in the present day. As the novel begins, Ellis is contemplating leaving her husband and taking her baby son with her; Dove is mourning the death of her adoptive mother – and writing a novel about Ellis. Dove's first ... (read more)

Reading Australia: 'It's Raining in Mango' by Thea Astley

August 2015, no. 373 17 February 2015
It’s Raining in Mango: Pictures from the Family Album was first published in 1987, on the eve of the bicentenary of white settlement in Australia, when many versions of the story of Australia were advanced and debated. Thea Astley’s book presents a family, the Laffeys, as a microcosm of the national story. It is a novel made up of stories told by Connie, an ageing woman, as she mulls over ‘p ... (read more)

''Tirra Lirra' and Beyond - Jessica Anderson’s truthful fictions' by Susan Sheridan

September 2010, no. 324 01 September 2010
‘Everyone I talk to remembers Tirra Lirra by the River as a wonderful book, sometimes even as a life-changing one. But why don’t we hear anything about it today?’ This was a young journalist who had been assigned to write Jessica Anderson’s obituary. Anderson, who died in Sydney on 9 July 2010, was the author of seven novels and a volume of stories, but it was her fourth published book, Ti ... (read more)

Susan Sheridan reviews 'Collected Poems: Lesbia Harford' edited by Oliver Dennis

November 2014, no. 366 01 November 2014
In her short life (1891–1927), Lesbia Harford wrote hundreds of poems and a novel, took a law degree at the University of Melbourne, had love affairs with both women and men, worked as a machinist in clothing factories, and was active in the anti-conscription movement during World War I and the International Workers of the World (‘the Wobblies’). She was the quintessential modern woman of th ... (read more)

Susan Sheridan reviews 'Down in the City' by Elizabeth Harrower

February 2014, no. 358 19 January 2014
Elizabeth Harrower’s début novel was first published by Cassell in London in 1957. Down in the City begins with a hymn to Sydney, with its beaches, harbour suburbs, city arcades – and disreputable Kings Cross, ‘a haven for the foreigner and racketeer; a beacon for long-haired boys, mascaraed women and powdered men. It is Montmartre: it is bright and wicked.’ ... (read more)

Susan Sheridan reviews 'Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and My Family' by Gabrielle Carey

December 2013–January 2014, no. 357 01 December 2013
When Gabrielle Carey wrote Puberty Blues (1979) with her school friend Kathy Lette, it was closely based on her own experience as a teenager. This initiated a writing career specialising in autobiography. Her novel The Borrowed Girl (1994) is based on her experience of living in a Mexican village, and So Many Selves (2006) is a personal memoir. Her new book extends the work of mourning and remembe ... (read more)

Susan Sheridan reviews 'Collected' by Rosemary Dobson

July–August 2012, no. 343 10 July 2012
This volume contains all the poems that Rosemary Dobson wants to preserve. They represent a substantial portion of her output, which seems right for a poet who began with a degree of quiet confidence and poise that belied her youth. From the earliest, published when she was in her twenties, to the latest, dictated only last year by the ninety-year-old poet to her daughter, the poems attest to the ... (read more)
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