To Try Her Fortune In London

Between 1870 and 1940 thousands of Australian women were drawn to London, their imperial metropolis and the centre of the art, publishing, theatrical and educational worlds. This study examines connections between whiteness, colonial status and modernity.

Stella Miles Franklin became an international publishing sensation in 1901, with "My Brilliant Career," a portrayal of an ambitious and independent woman defying social expectations that still captivates readers. In a magisterial biography, Roe details Miles' extraordinary life.

"London may have many rooms, but is there space for the travelling colonial? This collection of essays, memoirs and poems was initially inspired by the Malaysian writer Lee Kok Liang's ... London does not belong to me." --book cover.

In her study of the unsuccessful nineteenth-century emigrant, Tamara S. Wagner argues that failed emigration and return drive nineteenth-century writing in English in unexpected, culturally revealing ways. Wagner highlights the hitherto unexplored subgenre of anti-emigration writing that emerged as an important counter-current to a pervasive emigration propaganda machine that was pressing popular fiction into its service. The exportation of characters at the end of a novel indisputably formed a convenient narrative solution that at once mirrored and exaggerated public policies about so-called 'superfluous' or 'redundant' parts of society. Yet the very convenience of such pat endings was increasingly called into question. New starts overseas might not be so easily realizable; emigration destinations failed to live up to the inflated promises of pro-emigration rhetoric; the 'unwanted' might make a surprising reappearance. Wagner juxtaposes representations of emigration in the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Frances Trollope, and Charlotte Yonge with Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian settler fiction by Elizabeth Murray, Clara Cheeseman, and Susanna Moodie, offering a new literary history not just of nineteenth-century migration, but also of transoceanic exchanges and genre formation.

This volume brings together historians of imperialism and race, travel and modernity, Islam and India, the Pacific and the Atlantic to show how a 'transnational' approach to history offers fresh insights into the past. Transnational history is a form of scholarship that has been revolutionising our understanding of history in the last decade. With a focus on interconnectedness across national borders of ideas, events, technologies and individual lives, it moves beyond the national frames of analysis that so often blinker and restrict our understanding of the past. Many of the essays also show how expertise in 'Australian history' can contribute to and benefit from new transnational approaches to history. Through an examination of such diverse subjects as film, modernity, immigration, politics and romance, Connected Worlds weaves an historical matrix which transports the reader beyond the local into a realm which re-defines the meaning of humanity in all its complexity. Contributors include Tony Ballantyne, Desley Deacon, John Fitzgerald, Patrick Wolfe and Angela Woollacott.

Embraced for the dramatic opportunities afforded by a house full of strangers, the British boarding house emerged as a setting for novels published during the interwar period by a diverse range of women writers from Stella Gibbons to Virginia Woolf. To use the single room in the boarding house or bedsit, Terri Mullholland argues, is to foreground a particular experience. While the single room represents the freedoms of independent living available to women in the early twentieth century, it also marks the precariousness of unmarried women’s lives. By placing their characters in this transient space, women writers could explore women's changing social roles and complex experiences – amateur prostitution, lesbian relationships, extra-marital affairs, and abortion – outside traditional domestic narrative concerns. Mullholland presents new readings of works by canonical and non-canonical writers, including Stella Gibbons, Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, and Virginia Woolf. A hybrid of the modernist and realist domestic fiction written and read by women, the literature of the single room merges modernism's interest in interior psychological states with the realism of precisely documented exterior spaces, offering a new mode of engagement with the two forms of interiority.

First detailed investigation into the popular dimensions of late-Victorian London Conservatism.