Abstract
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This essay is situated at the crossroad of critical approaches to
medievalism - the postmedieval citation, interpretation, or recreation
of the Middle Ages - and to Australian women's writing. 1 It sets
out to supplement the wealth of excellent work on the New Woman novel,
and in particular on its antipodean iteration, the Australian Girl novel,
by considering this genre's surprisingly rich and thoughtful engagement
with the practices of late nineteenth-century medievalism.2 Susan Magarey
has argued that the New Woman novel 'acquired a particular resonance in
the Australian colonies' because it accorded with the Australian nationalist
quest for an iconic female counterpart to the Coming Australian Man - the
Australian Girl (105). As such, these novels were bound up with notions
of national futurity as well as with gender relations. Medievalism is used
here as a side-window to access the largely submerged engagement with
concepts of the pre-modern that underlay Australian women's depictions of
colonial society and women's place within it. Patricia Murphy has argued
that it is vital to register the ways in which New Woman novels' emergence
out of the late Victorian period led them to 'import temporal discourses
. .. to illuminate heightened gender anxieties wrought by this rebellious
anomaly' (Murphy 2). Through an examination of works by four late nineteenth-century Australian women writers - Tasma (Jessie Couvreur),
Catherine Martin, Ada Cambridge, and Rosa Praed - which explores their
differing intersections with medievalism as a temporal discourse, this essay
will argue that their work reflects that discourse's unique capacity to probe
contemporary gender and colonial ideologies via its oscillation between
premodernity and modernity.