I have commented before in ABR that literary criticism is a rara avis in Australia’s publishing world, so perhaps it is not surprising that Ann Vickery has had to find an overseas publisher for this important contribution to Australia’s literary and cultural history. Whatever its provenance, I have a particular reason for welcoming this contextualising study of the work and times of six women poets of the early twentieth century: Mary Gilmore, Marie Pitt, Mary Fullerton, Anna Wickham, Zora Cross, Lesbia Harford and Nettie Palmer. In my final fling at applying for an Australia Research Council grant, I proposed a project called ‘Radical Passions’, which was to bring back into print a selection of the poetry of Pitt, Cross and Dulcie Deamer, along with an essay that would explore the shifting nature of their political radicalism, the extent to which their irregular sexual liaisons with literary alpha males affected their writing and careers, and the nature of their reception in their own time and post-mortem. I hardly knew whether to be peeved or relieved when funding was not forthcoming, but I was certainly annoyed by the negative reviewer (and only one is needed to sink any ARC application) who opined that this was going to be ‘just another feminist whinge’.

I am consoled by the fact that Vickery’s book covers so much of the territory that I was interested in, with a larger cast and a more extensive intellectual orientation, in that she looks at the relationship of the writing and lives of these women to both the culture of modernity and the specifically artistic phenomenon of modernism. As for being ‘a whinge’, be assured it isn’t, even when Vickery writes of Anna Wickham, committed to a mental hospital by the partner in her troubled marriage (possibly at the instigation of her father) and finally hanging herself; or of Nettie Palmer, the one among them who probably paid the highest price for her (undoubtedly devoted) relationship with the literary alpha male that was Vance Palmer in his heyday.