Eleanor Dark is one of the great novelists of Australia’s mid-twentieth century, along with Christina Stead, Katharine Susannah Prichard, and Patrick White. The modernity of her writing is still stunning. But it has always been difficult to grasp her oeuvre whole. Her novels have seldom, if ever, all been in print at once, and some have virtually disappeared from sight, while the popular success of The Timeless Land (1941) overshadowed the achievements of her other works. Oh, for a ‘standard edition’ of all her titles! Somehow her career lacks a satisfying shape or trajectory, as if it amounts to less than the sum of its often brilliant parts. As G.A. Wilkes put it in 1951, ‘The kind of novel she can write well … no longer satisfies her; the kind of novel she wants to write, she has not yet achieved.’

We should be grateful, then, for a new full-length study of Dark’s life and works. Marivic Wyndham’s book is a biographical study, but one focused less on the formation of the self than ‘the interrelationships between [Dark’s] personal world, her literature and her society-in-crisis’. It has new things to say about Dark’s family life and gives more importance than previous studies to her mother and stepmother alongside the decidedly mixed blessings of her father, Dowell O’Reilly, and about Eric Dark, crucial in every aspect of Dark’s mature writing life, both protector and disturbing element, Wyndham suggests.