Heather Neilson

The story of the only female pope (to date) emerged in the thirteenth century, and for some time thereafter was widely disseminated in Europe. She was initially alleged to have lived in the twelfth century, but what would become the best-known version of the story placed her election as pope in the year 855. The pontificate of ‘John Anglicus’ was said to have lasted for approximately two and a half years, between those of Leo IV and Benedict III. The story, which may have originated as parody, flourished in credence. The head of ‘Johannes VIII, Femina de Anglia’ was included in a series of busts of the legitimate popes in the nave of the Cathedral of Siena until 1600, when Pope Clement VIII ordered its removal and formally declared that the impostor pope had never existed. With no contemporary evidence substantiating the audacious tale of ‘Pope Joan’, it appears to have been a kind of medieval urban legend. Despite this, her appeal to artists and writers persists, adaptations of the story including two film versions, novels, plays, and (premièring in 2011) a musical.

Percival Everett is a professor of English at the University of Southern California, and the author of numerous works of fiction published over the past forty years. Throughout his oeuvre, he has explored the ways in which texts engage with other texts, and has vigorously critiqued the persistent stereotyping of African Americans in the cultural history of the United States. His best-known novel is probably Erasure (2001), a complex satire directed at the publishing and media industries. Cord Jefferson’s recent adaptation of that novel, American Fiction, which won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for 2023, has drawn further attention to Everett’s whole career. However, James, Everett’s reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), from the perspective of the escaped slave Jim, may prove to be his most critically and commercially successful work thus far.

American writer Gore Vidal was an intimate of political power. His grandfather was a US senator; his father served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Director of Air Commerce. When his mother remarried, to Hugh Auchincloss, Vidal obtained a descendant of Vice President Aaron Burr as a stepfather ...

The editors of Conversations with Gore Vidal – a recently published selection of interviews conducted with Vidal over the course of his long career – introduce the volume by quoting a comment made in the New Yorker in 1960: ‘Nothing’s easier nowadays than to get the feeling of being surrounded by Gore Vidal.’ They go on to remark that, today: ‘Gore Vidal is again seemingly everywhere.’ Although this is something of an exaggeration, it is true that Vidal and his diverse oeuvre appear to have received more serious attention in the past few years than previously. Now eighty years old, this unique and often controversial figure in American culture has lived long enough to see accepted into the mainstream several of his ideas once regarded as outrageous or ‘unpatriotic’. Indeed, as a Publisher’s Weekly reviewer, quoted by Altman, remarked in 2004: ‘Vidal may be in tune with the zeitgeist again …’

At one point in A War for Gentlemen, a school-teacher is reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin to her class in rural New South Wales in 1872. Seven-year-old Annie Fitzhenry excitedly announces that her father had fought for the North during the US Civil War. When the teacher subsequently visits Annie’s home, both she and the child are abruptly undeceived. Charles Fitzhenry is indeed a veteran of that war, but had served in the Confederate army.

Harriet Beecher Slowe forcefully argued that the disintegration of the families of slaves was perhaps the most pernicious aspect of slavery. In French’s novel, it is racial prejudice that separates parents, children and siblings – tragically, because entirely unnecessarily.

Sylvia Lawson’s How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia warrants a second reading to be properly appreciated. The seven pieces in this collection are intricately connected, so that the messages are cumulatively conveyed. The book manifests its author’s ambitious desire to raise the consciousness of her readers. For me, however, the question remains: who is the intended audience?

The editors of Who Do You Think You Are? cheerfully point out the imprecision and contradictoriness of the second part of their title. ‘How can you be born in Australia and also be an immigrant? If you were not born in Australia but came here at an early age, how can you be second generation?’ Nevertheless, they have chosen to regard the linguistic slipperiness and confusion inherent in the term ‘second generation immigrant’ as being appropriate to the social reality of those to whom it refers. The thirty-five contributors are therefore predominantly women who were born in Australia of immigrant parents or who came to Australia at an early age.