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An Australian Girl (1890)

von Catherine Martin

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402618,445 (4)17
Stella Courtland's transformation from an independent girl with a passion for the writings of Goethe, Schiller, and Kant to a married woman, hemmed in by social constraints, is the subject of Catherine Martin's novel of 1890. An exploration of the fate of an Australian `New Woman', the novelis also steeped in questions of Australian identity. Not only does Martin satirize and scrutinize colonial hierarchies, but she anticipates Australia's nationhood and the values of a new generation.A journalist and essayist as well as a novelist, Catherine Martin was fascinated the question of what `Australianness' might be at a time when Australia was breaking away from its status as a British colony, and, through the story of Stella's moral and emotional growth she paints a vivid picture ofthis turning point in Australian history.… (mehr)
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Catherine Martin was born on the Isle of Skye, late in the 1840s. Her family were poor crofters and some years later they emigrated to South Australia , alongside many other impoverished Highland families.

There were lessons for the children on the long, long voyage to Australia, and Catherine came to love language and literature. Her education would continue in Australia; she became a teacher, she became a wife, she developed progressive views; she came to especially love German language and literature, and she began to publish poems and translations.

All of this would inform this book – her first novel – which was published anonymously in 1890.

‘An Australian Girl’ is the story of Stella Courtland. She was beautiful, articulate, and sociable; and she loved the world around her and all the things she could do in that world just as much as she loved her books and intellectual pursuits. She was one of the youngest children of a large family, most of her siblings had scattered, and only the youngest were left at home with their widowed mother. Stella was ready to fly, but she would never flout the conventions of society; she would always love her home, and she was able to travel to visit friends and family in different parts of South Australia.

I had to love Stella. She was a wonderful mixture of new woman and tradition heroine, and she was completely and utterly a woman of a particular time and place.

Edward Ritchie had been a childhood friend and he had become Stella’s most devoted suitor. He was a successful and wealthy pastoralist, and though he had no interest in books and learning himself he was happy for Stella to pursue whatever interests she had, to live however she wished, just as long as she would become his bride.

Their friends and their families thought that it would be a wonderful match; but Stella knew that she loved him as a friend and no more than that, and so she did her best to refuse his proposals without losing his friendship.

When Stella was introduced to a visitor from England, Dr Anselm Langdale, she knew that she had done the right thing. They shared the same interests, and they were perfectly matched, both intellectually and romantically.

Friends and family were unsure, but Stella was certain.

The trouble was that one person, Ritchie’s sister Laurette Tareling was unhappy with that match. She had serious financial and marital issues, she would do anything within her power to resolve them and claim the social position that she knew should be hers, and she wanted her brother safely married to Stella.

The story moves between Australia and Europe as it plays out, beginning as a classical Victorian drama, coming close to a sensation novel as it moves forward, and finally settling into a wonderful conclusion when Stella came to realise that she must make her own decisions and determine her own future.

There was an conventional route along which Catherine Martin could have steered her heroine, and I am so pleased that she didn’t, and that the route that she did take was influenced by the values that Stella was raised with as well as her own independent thinking.

Her story says much about the world that she lived in, how it had developed, how it might change in the future, and exactly what in meant to be an Australian woman in the latter years of the 19th century.

The writing is effective in many ways. It describes Stella’s world, especially the natural world that she so loves, wonderfully well. It captures conversations so well that I could hear them in my head. It allows me to understand her life, and to see and feel all of the things that she does.

The book as a whole though felt a little odd. The early chapters were almost entirely conversation, they were followed by a series of letters from Stella to her brother setting out all of the details of what she was doing, and then it settled into traditional storytelling.

I enjoyed the conversations, but I was anxious for the story to open out. I loved the letters, and they were so illuminating that I could forgive the fact that they fell into the kind of narrative that felt more like a book than a letter. I enjoyed what followed, but the prose lacked elegance, and the story didn’t flow as naturally as it might. There is nothing that I can say is wrong, but I can say that Catherine Martin is not as skilled a storyteller as the writers who influenced her.

The accounts of what Stella saw when she was doing ‘good works’ made me think of Dickens; many of the drawing room scenes made me think of Trollope; and some of the later drama made me think of Wilkie Collins …

That isn’t what will stay with me; what will stay with me is the story of a wonderful heroine and all that her story told me about her country. ( )
2 abstimmen BeyondEdenRock | Dec 13, 2017 |
An Australian Girl is the story of Stella Courtland. Like Dorothea Brooke, she was schooled in the German classics and Anglican theory, able to discuss either and hold her own. Unlike Eliot's Dorothea, she was also beautiful, witty and a lover of the outdoors. She was able to maintain her independence, but since she was a well brought up unmarried nineteenth century woman, she lived with her widowed mother and travelled for extended stays to various friends and relations around the colony of South Australia.

Stella had two suitors. Edward Ritchie, a brash wealthy Australian landowner, completely uninterested in books and learning, had pursued her since they were children, patiently waiting for her to "come to her senses" and accept him, even though she may not love him as he loves her. Everyone in their circles knew of this courtship. The other suitor was a visitor from England, Dr Anselm Langdale, a man who appreciated Stella's intellectual qualities as much as her more conventional ones. This courtship was unknown to those around them.

An Australian Girl is in many ways a classic nineteenth century novel and draws on other authors from the period, while maintaining the author's distinct point of view. There is the social commentary, where Ritchie's father's library is described as
... a room full of lame and impotent compilations in 'books' clothing'. Thinglets fit only to wrap candles in, or make winding-sheets in Lent for pilchards, or keep butter in the market place from melting. There were rows upon rows of such stuff as the Rev. Ebeneezer Slipslop on Corinthians; awful Encyclopedias and Treasuries of Knowledge, and biographies of self made men who, to the prime sin of having existed at all, added the no less unpardonable one of swelling the dreariest form of fiction. So many and so many and such woe. In proportion to the keen pleasure we associate with real books is the gloom which the bare sight of such biblia a-biblia can induce.


There is the Wilkie Collins style female villain. All Victorian novels must have a villain and An Australian Girl has a superb one in the form of Laurette Tareling, a person so evil she is referred to in the introduction as "the novel's Iago". Laurette had serious financial and Marital problems, and would do anything to resolve them and continue her climb up the social ladder. There is the pathos of Dickens in some of the beautifully sketched minor characters, unfortunates whom Stella visited as part of her duty rounds, rounds she made gladly. Then there are the discussions of morality, purpose, religion, science and philosophy so loved by certain Victorians. Not loved by all however, for when this book was edited down by the publisher for its second release, much of the dropped material had to do with Kant, Heine and Goethe, with socialism, with social reform and other weighty matters of the day. Amanda Nettelbeck's introduction to the book quotes the London Spectator review of the anonymous three volume version, which said "it requires more mental concentration than most people care to devote to a novel".

Two things set [An Australian Girl] apart from the more conventional Victorian novel though. The first is its twist on a standard Victorian ending. Where Stella's tragedy and subsequent crisis would normally be resolved by yet another tragedy off to the side, a tragedy which would benefit all and lead to a happy or at least uplifting ending, there is no such corrective here. Stella must work her way through what happened to her and resolve to live with it and by it.

The second is a decidedly nationalist bent. Stella is Australian and lest there be any doubt, the title clearly states that she is. She does not see herself as a colonial, confusing the wives of colonial administrators when she insists on identifying herself as Australian. She looks forward to the future and a time when Australia will be a nation*, not back to London and its imperial decrees. Unlike more sheltered Victorian women in the old country, Stella loves the outdoors, venturing out daily, often on her own. She cares for animals wild and domestic. Importantly, she takes as much delight in the wild untamed landscape of Australia, as she does in the lovingly cultivated "English" gardens on the estates. Her interests go further, to aboriginal ethnography. Ritchie fervently believes that the administrators do nothing to forward the interests of the colony; that they are only filling in time to advance their own careers.

All this started me wondering about other Victorian era novels, written in former British colonies by people who actually lived there, not people who merely incorporated a colonial aspect into their novels as so many domestic Victorian writers did. Sadly I drew a blank. I couldn't even think of a single nineteenth century Canadian fiction title, and had similar luck mentally going through other countries of the former empire.

Surely there must be more writers than Catherine Martin, excellent though she was. Perhaps they fell into obscurity, ignored by those same imperial administrators who set the curricula for the colonies, filling it instead with writers from the shores of "home". This seems to have been the fate of [An Australian Girl]. After the publication of the 1894 Australian version, it wasn't published again until 1988. There could be many more treasures like this out there. Do you know of any? South America did not have this problem; its nineteenth century literature is full of national sentiment. Unfortunately I'm not familiar with literature from former Dutch or German colonies. Perhaps someone could comment on nationalist literature from them.

______________________
*this happened in 1901
3 abstimmen SassyLassy | Mar 13, 2014 |
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Stella Courtland's transformation from an independent girl with a passion for the writings of Goethe, Schiller, and Kant to a married woman, hemmed in by social constraints, is the subject of Catherine Martin's novel of 1890. An exploration of the fate of an Australian `New Woman', the novelis also steeped in questions of Australian identity. Not only does Martin satirize and scrutinize colonial hierarchies, but she anticipates Australia's nationhood and the values of a new generation.A journalist and essayist as well as a novelist, Catherine Martin was fascinated the question of what `Australianness' might be at a time when Australia was breaking away from its status as a British colony, and, through the story of Stella's moral and emotional growth she paints a vivid picture ofthis turning point in Australian history.

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