Her Selection | edited by Lynne Spender

Her Selection: Writings by Nineteenth-Century Australian Women was first published in 1988 by Penguin Books.

In her Introduction, Lynne Spender discusses her motivation for curating this selection. Previous collections had been put together ‘on the basis of accepted literary traditions rather than on women’s interests‘, with a focus on men, mateship and the outback. She states that

_{when women’s writing did not reflect nor promote this image of Australia and its new national heroes, their work was largely ignored.}

She aims to rectify this with Her Selection. A selection that shows women learning to live in a new country very different from the one they left behind, whilst making a home and raising a family. Many of these stories also reveal how the women often had different attitudes towards and relationships with the Aboriginal people in their communities, compared to stories written by men at this time.

The collection includes letters written in the 1830’s from one of the first white colonists in WA, Georginana Molloy to Mary Gaunt who was one of the first group of women to attend university in Melbourne.

Author	Short story	Dates
Georgiana Molloy	Letters	1805-1843
Anna Maria Bunn	The Guardian	1808-1899
Louisa Anne Meredith	Over the Straits	1812-1895
Mary Theresa Vidal	Tales for the Bush	1815-1895
Annie Maria Baxter	Memories of the Past	1816-1905
Catherine Helen Spence	A Week in the Future	1825-1910
Annabella Boswell	An Account of Early Port Macquarie	1826-1914
Rachel Henning	Letters	1826-1914
Caroline Woolmer Leakey	The Broad Arrow	1827-1881
Mary Fortune (Waif Wander)	Bertha’s Legacy	1833-1911
Caroline Louisa Atkinson	Tom Hellicar’s Children	1834-1872
Ada Cambridge	The Perversity of Human Nature	1844-1926
Catherine Martin	The Incredible Journey	1847-1937
Jessie Couvreur (Tasma)	Monsieur Caloche	1848-1897
Louisa Lawson	The Dawn	1848-1920
Rosa Praed	Aurea	1851-1935
Mary Gaunt	The Uncounted Cost	1861-1942

This post was written on the traditional land of the Wangal clan, one of the 29 clans of the Eora Nation within the Sydney basin. This Reading Life acknowledges that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are our first storytellers.