A dense, experimental, postmodern, lesbian-feminist novel, Remember The Tarantella will be referred to by future generations as a landmark in Australian literary history. The book is not without problems, but in language and form it attempts to recover and recreate women’s history and culture and by doing so, challenges notions of a singular, dominant authorial voice, plays with narrative expectation and demands at all times the active participation of its reader.

The book’s focus (and dominant metaphor) is the frenzied ‘pagan’ Dance of the Tarantella (still performed by peasant women in the ‘festas’ of Italy) and in ‘remembering’ this Dance we are asked to ‘remember’, that is, to ‘give back the limbs/power’ to women’s culture. In recent centuries (Christian) the Dance was said to be the only cure for the bite of the tarantula spider (the ‘curative’ tarantella). However, there is no evidence that the spider was poisonous and it is assumed that the notion of the ‘bite’ was simply an excuse for people of all classes to once again enjoy ‘pagan’ pleasures.