Louise Mack (1870–1935)
Auteur de Teens: A Story of Australian Schoolgirls
Séries
Œuvres de Louise Mack
A Woman's Experiences in the Great War: An Australian Author's Clandestine Journey Through War-Torn Belgium (1915) 9 exemplaires
Girls Together 4 exemplaires
World War I Memoirs: First-Hand Recollections of the Battles, Dramas and Tragedies of 'The War to End All… (2021) 3 exemplaires
Maiden's Prayer 1 exemplaire
Teens Triumphant 1 exemplaire
Girls Together: A Story of Girl Life in Australia 1 exemplaire
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
Vous aimerez peut-être aussi
Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 9
- Membres
- 36
- Popularité
- #397,831
- Évaluation
- 3.5
- Critiques
- 2
- ISBN
- 13
- Langues
- 1
This is the blurb:
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:
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...
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)