Rosemary Lancaster
Autor/a de Je Suis Australienne: Remarkable Women in France, 1880-1945
Sobre l'autor
Rosemary Lancaster is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia.
Obres de Rosemary Lancaster
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Gènere
- female
Membres
Ressenyes
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 3
- Membres
- 18
- Popularitat
- #630,789
- Valoració
- 4.0
- Ressenyes
- 1
- ISBN
- 9
The table of contents gives a good indication as to why I was so pleased to find it:
I've read The Beauties and Furies (see here) but I'm 'saving' the chapter about Christina Stead until I've read House of All Nations, which is on the TBR. And although I don't have it yet, I'm also leaving the chapter about Stella Bowen till I've either tracked down or given up looking for Drawn from Life (which is her memoir of her life in Paris with Ford Madox Ford). Australian author Debbie Robson read it as research for her trilogy and she has written an enticing review of it at Goodreads. Stella Bowen is known to many Australians as a war artist, and in particular for her painting 'Bomber Crew' which was recently featured on a commemorative stamp for Anzac Day so I would like to read her book if I can find a copy of it. So this review is only about the other four chapters...
Daisy White was an inspired choice to begin the book. She and her sister Dorothy were parked in a finishing school Paris by her middle-class Australian parents who quickly left them to it. As Rosemary Lancaster puts it:
There are many interesting aspects to Daisy's account of her Parisian life. She wasn't much interested in the social aspirations that mattered so much to her parents that they were willing to abandon such young girls, but she thrived on experiencing great literature and art. Despite this, she was peeved that the curriculum at Les Ruches was less engaging than her Australian education where physical geography, physics and chemistry, and nature 'under all forms' were, in her opinion, 'some of the most delightful studies ever to charm a student. Alas, arithmetic at Les Ruches was described as 'simply insupportable', chemistry as 'a little more bearable' and physics as 'simply beastly, drier than bone-dust, and pretty hard to understand.' From Lancaster's analysis we can gather that Daisy's Sydney school was progressive, because she learned sciences as well as the two usual areas of knowledge, which were subjects such as English, literature, composition and grammar, elementary mathematics, history and geography, even elocution and calligraphy; and also the 'accomplishments' (music, drawing and modern languages; dancing, needlework, callisthenics, and sometimes more unusual crafts). She must have had good teachers of French in Australia too, because all the lessons at Les Ruches were in French and yet she achieved excellent results. Daisy doesn't hold back in her opinions about the teachers at Les Ruches, but they can't have been all that bad!
Her school calendar, however, also included chaperoned excursions to cultural activities, including visits to galleries, monuments, theatres, parks, boulevards, shops and gardens. She went everywhere: the Louvre, Notre-Dame, Sainte-Chapelle, the Panthéon, and Napoleon's Tomb. She saw France's most-loved plays, and this cultural saturation developed an aesthetic sensibility that is remarkable in one so young. It is almost painful to read that we know almost nothing about her return to Australia, except that she died of cardiac failure, aged only thirty two.
The next chapter, about Jessie Couvrier a.k.a. 'Tasma' is more literary, and there's not so much about her life. I haven't read any of Tasma's Parisian novels, and don't intend to, despite Lancaster's suggestion that they are of academic interest. I might one day read Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill (1889), (which gets a mention in Jean-François Vernay's A Brief Take on the Australian Novel and his The Great Australian Novel, a Panorama. See also Bill's review at The Australian Legend). But the Parisian romances, The Penance of Portia James and Not Counting the Cost, just don't appeal, even if they are unique social and literary documents. Nonetheless, it is interesting to read about Tasma's time in the Bohemian ambience of the Latin Quarter and how she used the city's legendary reputation as a site of freedom and decadence in her novels.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/05/07/je-suis-australienne-remarkable-women-in-fra...… (més)