Literary Studies

Lusting for London: Australian Expatriate Writers at the Hub of Empire, 1870–1950 by Peter Morton

Item: Lusting for London
Author: Lucy Sussex

by Lucy Sussex •

June 2012, no. 342

Palgrave Macmillan, $145 hb, 294 pp

Literary Studies

Lusting for London: Australian Expatriate Writers at the Hub of Empire, 1870–1950 by Peter Morton

by Lucy Sussex •

June 2012, no. 342

Until recently, there was a prevailing attitude that to succeed as a professional author one had to go into exile. The small Australian market could not support a writing career; it was necessary to travel abroad and court a larger readership. Because Australia was a British colony, the obvious destination was London, heart of empire.

Lucy Sussex

By this contributor

Lucy Sussex comes from Christchurch, New Zealand, and lectures at La Trobe University. She has edited four anthologies of short fiction. Her award-winning work includes five books for younger readers and the novel, The Scarlet Rider (1996). She has written the short story collections, My Lady Tongue (1988), A Tour Guide in Utopia (1995), and Absolute Uncertainty (2001). Currently she has a weekly review column in The Age. She has published Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction (2010) and an anthology of Victorian writing, Saltwater in the Ink (2010).