Review: Eve Langley and The Pea Pickers by Helen Vines (Monash University Publishing)
When your subject is a mid-century, gender-ambiguous author who lived under other names and wasn’t always honest about basic points of identification, writing a biography is a huge challenge. But Helen Vines’ Eve Langley and The Pea Pickers builds a substantial picture of this elusive author. Eve (left) and June Langley, 1920s. Courtesy of Monash University Publishing
I first came to Langley’s work through her 1940 poem Native-Born as part of my research on dead kangaroos in Australian literature.
Langley had been absent from my educational curriculum, dominated by her male contemporaries Kenneth Slessor, Nevil Shute and the school-boy squabbles of the Ern Malley affair and the more influential Patrick White and Randolph Stow. This wasn’t unusual in the 80s and 90s. Now, it is hard to justify any more than a sprinkling of them in an English course.
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