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Flora Eldershaw

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Flora Eldershaw
Born16 March 1897
Australia Darlinghurst, Sydney
Died20 September 1956
Australia Wagga Wagga, New South Wales
Occupation(s)Novelist, Critic, Historian

Flora Sydney Patricia Eldershaw (1897-1956) was an Australian novelist, critic, and historian. With Marjorie Barnard she formed the writing collaboration known as M. Barnard Eldershaw. She was also a teacher, and later a public servant.

Eldershaw was active in Australian literary circles, including becoming the first woman President of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. For both her writing output and her active support for and promotion of writers, Eldershaw made a significant contribution to Australian literary life.

Life

Eldershaw was born in Sydney but grew up in the Riverina district of country New South Wales. She was the fifth of eight children born to Henry Sirdefield Eldershaw, a station manager, and Margaret (née McCarroll). She attended boarding school at Mount Erin Convent in Wagga Wagga.

After school, she studied history and Latin at the University of Sydney where she met Marjorie Barnard with whom she later formed a writing collaboration, under the name M. Barnard Eldershaw. She worked as a teacher, first at Cremorne Church of England Grammar and then, from 1923, at Presbyterian Ladies' College, Croydon, where she became senior English mistress and head of the boarding school. According to Dever,[1] her Catholic education precluded her becoming headmistress. In 1941, she moved to Canberra to take up a government position, transferring to Melbourne in 1943 where she worked for the Department of Labour and National Service. In 1948 she started working as a private consultant in industrial matters such as women's legal rights and equal pay, and extending her interests into the welfare of Aboriginal and migrant women.[1]

Like many women writers of the time, she had to work to support her writing activities. Like them too, she faced difficulties about where to live. For a time she lived as a resident mistress at the Presbyterian Ladies' College, but came to hate the restrictions this entailed. Barnard, herself living under the restrictions of home, desribed her situation as 'untenable'.[2] In 1936 she and Barnard rented a small flat in Potts Point where they could give small dinner parties and to which they could retreat from school and home. In 1938 she moved out of school completely into a better flat in King's Cross.[2] During this time, these flats operated as something like a literary salon, as it was here that Eldershaw and Barnard were able to entertain many of their literary peers.

Like Marjorie Barnard, she never married. As her health failed she went to her sister's place in 1955, and died in hospital of a cerebral thrombosis in 1956.

Literary career

She was a leading figure in Sydney literary circles, becoming, in 1935, the first woman president of the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW),[3] a position she held again in 1943. As Dever writes,[1] 'With Barnard and Frank Dalby Davison, she developed policies on political and cultural issues, and helped to transform the F.A.W. into a vocal and sometimes controversial lobby group'. Through the late 1930s, these three were known as 'the triumvirate'.[4]. Besides these two, her literary associates included Vance and Nettie Palmer, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Judah Waten and Tom Inglis Moore.

It is well recognised that during the interwar years in Australia "women represented a significant section of of the writing community", that, in fact, this concentration "could be said to be one of the major distinguishing features of the then Australian literary landscape".[5] Women, including Eldershaw, were significant in the reviewing community, held office in major literary societies, judged literary competitions and edited anthologies.

Eldershaw actively promoted the needs of writers and in 1938 helped persuade the Commonwealth Literary Fund (CLF) to include grants and pensions for writers, and funding for university lectures on Australian literature. She was a member of the CLF from 1939 to 1953.

Collaboration

Main article: M. Barnard Eldershaw

Her major fiction output was produced in collaboration with Marjorie Barnard. Their first novel, A House is Built (1929) shared first prize, with Katharine Susannah Prichard's Coonardoo, in the Bulletin novel competition. They wrote four other novels, the last being the censored utopian novel, published in 1947 as Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and reissued in its entirety in 1983 under its original title, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947).

The collaboration, which lasted two decades, also produced histories, critical essays and lectures, and radio drama.

Selected works

Fiction

As M. Barnard Eldershaw

  • A House is Built (1929)
  • Green Memory (1931)
  • The Glasshouse (1936)
  • Plaque with Laurel (1937)
  • Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1945)
  • The Watch on the Headland (published in Australian Radio Plays, 1946)

Non-fiction

As Flora Eldershaw

  • Contemporary Australian Women Writers (1931)
  • Australian Literary Society Medallists (1935)
  • Australian Writers' Annual (1936, ed.)
  • The Peaceful Army: A Memorial to the Pioneer Women of Australia, 1788-1938 (1938)

As M. Barnard Eldershaw

  • Phillip of Australia: An Account of the Settlement of Sydney Cove, 1788-92 (1938)
  • Essays in Australian Fiction (1938)
  • The Life and Times of Captain George Piper (1939)
  • My Australia (1939)

Notes

  1. ^ a b c Dever (2006)
  2. ^ a b Modjeska (1981) p. 205
  3. ^ Adelaide (1988) p. 59
  4. ^ Nelson (2004)
  5. ^ Dever (1994) p. 133

References


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