Towards an Aesthetics of Australian Women’s Fiction: My Brilliant Career and The Getting of Wisdom

Abstract

Discusses the necessity for a theory of Australian woman's culture through which to read Australian novels authored by women. Drawing on insights from Virginia Woolf and Elaine Showalter, Bird outlines 'a methodology for reading and interpreting the forms, themes and rhetoric of Australian women's fiction in terms of the historical, social, political and psychological implications of their lives, as yet the contextual and theoretical evidence to establish this mode of reading women's writing in Australia is scant and lacks authority'.

The full text of this essay is available to ALS subscribers

Please sign in to access this article and the rest of our archive.

Published 1 October 1983 in Volume 11 No. 2. Subjects: Australian culture, Australian identity, Australian novels & novelists, Autobiographies, Bildungsroman, Feminism, Feminists, Gender - Literary portrayal, Gender roles, Sexism, Women writers, Henry Handel Richardson , Miles Franklin.

Cite as: Bird, Delys. ‘Towards an Aesthetics of Australian Women’s Fiction: My Brilliant Career and The Getting of Wisdom.’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, 1983, doi: 10.20314/als.6a5067c8bc.