Colonial Australian Women Poets

A tracing of the political and feminist significance of non-canonical women poets, Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, Mary Bailey, Caroline Leakey, Emily Manning, and Louisa Lawson, in colonial Australia

This book considers the political and feminist significance of non-canonical women poets, particularly those who were writing in newspapers and periodicals, in colonial Australia.

My book traces the significant poetic and political contributions made by non-canonical women poets, situating women's poetry both in colonial Australian print culture and in wider imperial and transnational contexts. Women poets in colonial Australia have tended to be represented as marginal and isolated figures or absent. This study intervenes by demonstrating an alternative networked tradition of transnational feminist poetics and politics beyond and around emergent masculine nationalism, particularly within newspapers and periodical print culture. Without the inclusion of periodical literature, women’s poetry in Australia during the colonial period would appear to have been fairly limited. When periodical literature is taken into account, this picture is radically altered, and poets emerge as consistent contributors, often across a variety of newspapers and journals, who were well-known, influential and connected with political figures and literary circles. In examining this poetry in the original context of the newspapers and journals, the political intervention and the reception of that poetry is made much more apparent.