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Louise Mack (1870–1935)

Auteur de Teens: A Story of Australian Schoolgirls

9 oeuvres 36 utilisateurs 2 critiques

Séries

Œuvres de Louise Mack

Étiqueté

Partage des connaissances

Nom légal
Mack, Mary Louise Hamilton
Autres noms
Gouli Gouli (pen name)
Mack, Marie Louise
Date de naissance
1870-10-10
Date de décès
1935-11-23
Sexe
female
Nationalité
Australia
Lieu de naissance
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Lieu du décès
Mosman, New South Wales, Australia
Lieux de résidence
London, England, UK
Florence, Italy
Antwerp, Belgium
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Professions
novelist
poet
journalist
war correspondent
Relations
Mack, Amy E. (sister)
Organisations
The Bulletin
Sydney Morning Herald
Courte biographie
Louise Mack was born in Hobart, Tasmania to the family of a Wesleyan minister. Her younger sister Amy Eleanor Mack also became a writer. The family moved frequently for their father's work and settled in Sydney in 1882. She was educated by a governess and attended Sydney Girls High School. In 1896, she married John Percy Creed, an Irish-born lawyer. That same year, she published her first novel, The World is Round. Her only collection of poetry, Dreams in Flower, appeared in 1901. From 1898 until 1901, she wrote a column called "A Woman's Letter" for The Bulletin under the pen-name of "Gouli Gouli." She drew on her school memories for her books Teens (1897) and Girls Together (1898). In 1901, she moved to England, without her husband, and worked as a journalist on The Daily Mail. She published the novels An Australian Girl in London (1902) and Children of the Sun (1904). She lived in Florence for six years, editing the Italian Gazette. At the outbreak of World War I, she was in Belgium, where she went to work as the first woman war correspondent for the Evening News and the London Daily Mail. Her eyewitness accounts of the terrifying German invasion of Antwerp, the desperate flood of refugees fleeing the city, and other events were published as A Woman's Experiences in the Great War in 1915. Returning to Australia in 1916, she gave public lectures about her war experiences and wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald, the Bulletin, and other newspapers and magazines. In 1924, she married Allen Illingworth Leyland, 20 years her junior. Among her last novels were Teens Triumphant (1933) and Maiden's Prayer (1934).

Membres

Critiques

Written as a series of letters to friends and family at home, An Australian Girl in London by Louise Mack (1870-1935) is a semi-autobiographical novel tracing a journey of self-discovery as the protagonist makes her way from Australia to London at the beginning of the 20th century. Though the novel was first published in 1902, it has been reissued by Grattan Street Press in its Colonial Fiction series #MinorTechnicality even though Australia had federated its colonies in 1901.

This is the blurb:
An Australian Girl in London, first published in 1902, is an endearing look at the journey of self-discovery that many young women of means made to the heart of Empire around the time of Federation. Its author, Louise Mack, a friend and rival of Ethel Turner, captures the experience of a provincial young woman immersing herself in the epic metropolis of London - its hard urban edges, and the challenges it poses for colonial talent, but also its rich history and culture.

Sylvia Leighton embarks on an increasingly familiar narrative in turn-of-the-century Australian fiction, travelling to England to establish herself in a country she has long dreamed of visiting. Fellow Australian Emmie Jones joins her, and the two girls share a boarding house and a very close bond.

So, it's a travel book, of sorts, written over 120 years ago. The world has changed immeasurably since then. London was the centre of a vast global empire at that time, and Britain was the most powerful nation in the world. Australians, who were mostly then of Anglo-Irish extraction, travelled on British passports and had a connection to Britain that few in multicultural 21st century Australia would feel today. Travellers had no option but to travel by ship, a journey which took weeks, and without the wealth of communication options available to us today, information exchanges between the two countries consisted of print: letters, newspapers and books. (Books being a mostly one-way traffic from Britain because the publishing industry in Australia had barely got started.)

Yet the An Australian Girl in London is not just an obscure period piece of interest only to scholars. What Mack captures so well is still valid today: the sense of anticipation about leaving Australia which is still a very long way from anywhere; the sense of wonder at the first encounter with places seen before only at second-hand; and finally, the sense of disillusionment when dreams of elsewhere collapse against reality.

Sylvia Leighton's enlightenment consists of expanding her horizons from newly federated Australia to realising her dreams of encountering sophistication and culture in London, and her gradual realisation when she forms the conflicting view that she has been sucked into the realm of hero-worship of England and actually there is much about Australia that is better than 'the motherland.' The style is lively, conversational and descriptive — and often lyrical when describing Australia. There's not much in the way of analysis although she interrogates her own feelings, emerging from enthusiastic naïveté to a more detached observation of what she sees.

In London at last, she is surprised to find that it's not the dreaded city of fogs that she was expecting, and that it is clean and neat and (in May) green everywhere. She is ecstatic at first, delighting in not getting lost, encountering nice policemen, and savouring the democratic values inherent in a statue of a sailor i.e. Nelson's Column. She likes the cheap shopping, and she loves being in the city of poets where she can see the Elgin Marbles and paintings by Turner. But — suddenly yearning for the wide open spaces of her homeland and the distance in the vistas that we see here — she wishes that Turner could have been an Australian:
Now I will tell you a great big secret. No one knows it except me and Turner. As he is dead — God bless his memory! — it falls to me to divulge it. And so:

Turner ought to have been born an Australian. The same Turner, same brain, same eye, same hand, same soul, but with Australia to mother him. In his pictures I see his craving for great distances. And there he would have satisfied himself.

Turner in the Blue Mountains looking away up the Kanimbla Valley one winter sunset! (p.80)

Like others of her era, Sylvia is careful to avoid writing anything that could be construed as disreputable. There is no shipboard romance and no overindulgence in champagne. What she sees and does is in the company of her shipboard companion Jean or with her boarding-house friend Emmie. Most of her letters are to family or 'everybody' but there is one written to Peggie, particularly addressed to her...
First, because it is all about a romantic adventure. Second, because you've never had one, my poor old romancing Peg. (p.32)

But as it turns out, Peggie is the sole recipient of this letter because it would alarm the family to learn that the pair had got lost in Naples, missed their steamer's departure, and had to undertake a dash by train in order to reconnect with it in Marseilles. They are cheated, and (allowing a little for melodrama) almost abducted, and rescued only just in time by a genial English gentleman called Gerald Huntley.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/01/03/an-australian-girl-in-london-1902-by-louise-...
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
anzlitlovers | Jan 2, 2023 |
Louise Mack was an Australian journalist who traveled to France and Belgium to report on the war in the early days when the lines were still fluid and the great dig-in had not hardened along trenches. She was caught a number of times in German territory though she somehow seemed to scrape by in all the confusion. Her Australian (ie. English) nationality could have gotten her shot as a spy, but she spoke French well enough to appear as a local. It's not a gripping adventure story but more subdued and introspective.

The book is very obscure. I read it only on the recommendation of Expatriot over at LibriVox who took the time to narrate a version. As he says in his review, it has problems. Her writing style is "Sentimental" which was a popular style at the time, in particular in Australia (see Songs of a Sentimental Bloke), but for modern ears it is intolerably kitsch. She also displays attitudes common at the time: extreme racism (towards Germans) and extreme nationalism. A toxic mix. Yet Mack can also be observant and occasionally her introspection provides insights into the mindset. In Chapter X she describes the cheeriness of people fighting:

[quote]

Yet [the soldier] became cheerful, just as cheerful as any of us. Strange as it seems in the telling, this cheerfulness is a normal condition of the people nearest the front. There is only one thing that kills it, loss of freedom when loss of freedom means loss of companionship. Ruin, danger, cold, hunger, heat, dirt, discomfort, wounds, suffering, death, are all dashed with glory, and become acceptable as part of the greatest adventure in the world. But loss of freedom wrings the colour from the brain, and shuts out this world and the next when it entails loss of comradeship.

When I first realised this strange phenomenon I thought it would take a volume of psychology to explain it. And then, all suddenly, with no effort of thought, I found the explanation revealing itself in one magic blessed word, Companionship. Out here in the danger-zones, the irksome isolation of ordinary lives has vanished. We are no longer alone ; there are no such things as strangers ; we are all together wherever we are; in the trenches, on the roads, in the trams, in the cities, in the villages, we all talk to each other, we all know each other's histories, we pour out our hopes and fears, we receive the warm, sweet stimulus of human comradeship multiplied out of all proportion to anything that life has ever offered any single one of us before, till even pain and death take on more gentle semblance seen with the eyes of a million people all holding hands.

[end quote]

The Great War was "a million people all holding hands". So incongruous, yet such a common theme of the day, cheerfully doing ones duty, cheerfully dieing. For Mack it was companionship "multiplied out of all proportion to anything that life has ever offered". The book then can be read as naivety, a complete lack of understanding about modern war. And how could she understand, they were inventing modern war. Yet we can't let her off that easy, there were many in England who protested the war. In the end, Mack was part of the problem and on the wrong side of history. That the book remains obscure speaks to its commonness.
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
Stbalbach | Jan 23, 2015 |

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Statistiques

Œuvres
9
Membres
36
Popularité
#397,831
Évaluation
½ 3.5
Critiques
2
ISBN
13
Langues
1