THE LITERARY TEXT AS HISTORICAL ARTIFACT:

THE COLONIAL COUPLE IN AUSTRALIAN ROMANTIC FICTION BY WOMEN,

1838–1860

Jodi McAlister
Deakin University

Abstract: This article inverts the title of Hayden White’s 1974 essay ‘The Historical Text
as Literary Artifact’ by exploring literary texts as historical artifacts. It uses three novels
published by Australian women writers in the mid-nineteenth century—Catherine
Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854), Caroline Louisa Atkinson’s Gertrude the Emigrant
(1857), and Mary Theresa Vidal’s Bengala, or Some Time Ago (1860)—as historical sources
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to explore the emotional culture of colonial Australia in regard to romantic love.

Following Sarah Pinto, this article takes the romantic couple as the centre of its analysis,
and asks four key questions of the novels in the corpus: What kind of people fall in love?
Who do they fall in love with? What kind of love do they fall in? And how do their lives
and their loves interact with the colonial Australian landscape? It finds that romantic
love in these novels is dependent on romanticised similarity and shared sensibility rather
than eroticised otherness. It argues that while this might not necessarily be uniquely
nationally distinctive, the Australian chronotopic context means that this narrative
would have strong and specific resonances with a female colonial audience.

In their 2010 book, Ann Curthoys and John Docker pose a provocative question: ‘is history fiction?’ This
is a neat distillation of a discussion that has preoccupied intellectual and cultural historians,1 particularly
since history emerged as a genre separate from literature after the long eighteenth century.2 ‘Are histories
shaped by narrative conventions, so that their meaning derives from their form rather than the past itself?’
Curthoys and Docker ask, as they set about the mission of exploring the connections and disconnections
between ‘questions of literary form and the desire for historical truth’.3
This article also seeks to explore these connections and disconnections between the historical
and the literary, but to approach it from the other side. Hayden White’s well-known 1974 essay on the
relationship between these two is called ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact’, but here, I am inverting
this title by exploring the literary text as historical artifact. What can fictional texts tell us about history? Or,
to rephrase the question posed by Curthoys and Docker: is fiction history?
The immediate sticking point here is that fiction is just that: fictional. Curthoys and Docker note
that one school of thought regarding the relationship between history and fiction asserts that ‘[h]istory is

1 See, among others: Lionel Gossman, ‘History and Literature: Reproduction or Signification’, in The Writing of History:
Literary Form and Historical Understanding, ed. Robert H. Canary & Henry Kozicki (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1978), 3-39; Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca & London: Cornell
University Press, 1983); Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact’, Clio 3, no. 3 (1974): 277-303.
2 Ann Curthoys and John Docker, Is History Fiction? (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2010), 51.
3 Curthoys and Docker, Is History Fiction? 3, 2.

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 McAlister, ‘The Literary Text as Historical Artifact’

history, and fiction fiction, and the two have nothing in common’—that is, fiction is not useful or reliable
as a historical archive.4 However, as I will show in this article, fiction can be a valuable source, especially
in the history of emotions. This article will interrogate what fictional texts (here, romantic novels written
by women) can tell us about romantic love in the Australian colonies between 1838–1860.

Emotional History and Popular Fiction

Hsu-Ming Teo argues that ‘if the circulation of texts throughout society can foster feelings of nationalism,
they can also create or affect emotional experiences of romantic love’.5 To this, I would add that they can
reflect emotional experiences and aspirational desires: the happy ending is, after all, an aspirational ending,
which, as Catherine Belsey argues, ‘promises to bring mind and body back into perfect unity, to heal the
rift in experience which divides individuals from themselves’.6 The interaction of audiences with texts is
complex. To understand this, I am using the work of Monique Scheer, who argues that:
Fictional representations in literature, theater, and film can be analyzed as artifacts used by actors
in their emotional practices, as providers of templates of language and gesture as well as mediators
of social norms. Texts will remain the main sources, not only for discourses and implicit orders
of knowledge, but also for emotives and other emotional practices.7

To rephrase this: texts functioned as sources for contemporary audiences that allowed them to better
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grasp the dominant emotional practices of their societies. Texts thus function as key objects in what
Barbara Rosenwein calls the ‘emotional community’, a ‘[group] in which people adhere to the same norms
of emotional expression and value—or devalue—the same or related emotions’.8 While emotions are
individually felt, they are socially and communally mediated. Scheer argues that emotions are both had
and done, both experienced and manifested.9 That manifestation of emotion—what emotion looks like,
how it is performed—is something texts offer particular opportunities for studying, as they model
emotional behaviours. While they might not tell us about the emotional practices of individuals, texts
offer an opportunity to interrogate the standards, values, and practices of an emotional community at a
given time. Popular fiction—a form, as the word ‘popular’ suggests, with mass appeal—necessarily
resonates with these standards, and so offers especially excellent opportunities for insight.
In particular, the popular romantic novels I am studying here offer insight into the emotional
lives of women, who were the assumed consumer.10 We can gain insight via narrative form, via
representation of the emotions of characters, and via reactions to these forms and representations by
contemporaneous commentators. Because these fictional texts were ‘artifacts used by actors in their
emotional practices’ as well as representations of emotional practices, we can also use them to pose
provocative questions: in what ways are these representations of emotional practices comments on the
societal realities?
Popular romantic fiction is an especially rich archive for doing research into the history of
romantic love. Romantic love is mandatorily represented, and where novels end happily, the form of the

4 Curthoys and Docker, Is History Fiction? 2.

5 Hsu-Ming Teo, ‘The Americanisation of Romantic Love in Australia’, in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective,
ed. Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2006), 171.
6 Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford: Wiley, 1994), 23.
7 Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian

Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 217-218.
8 Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), 2.
9 Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)?’ 195.
10 Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, ‘Popular Fiction and the “Emotional Turn”: The Case of Women in Late Victorian Britain’,

History Compass 8, no. 12 (2010): 1341.

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 Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Number 24, 2018

romantic relationship and of the happy ending allows us to gain insight into which emotional narratives
resonated with the contemporary readership. While it is difficult to know the exact makeup of this
readership, this form of fiction is generally assumed to be widely read by women. There are a few reasons
for this, including the association of women with ‘lowbrow’ culture and the concern of these novels with
emotions, an area usually stereotypically associated with women.11 Moreover, the vast majority of these
texts are written by women under female names, which suggests an implied female audience (unlike, for
example, George Eliot, who took a male pseudonym so as to reach a male audience). While we should
not assume that this audience is all-woman in either sense of the term—that is, an audience entirely made
up of women, or an audience of every woman in the colonies—popular romantic fiction offers us a
broader corpus for the study of colonial women and emotional standards than many other archives
available.
Many Australian female authors who wrote romantic novels in the nineteenth century ‘have been
dismissed as mere dabblers in romantic conventions’, something that ‘misrepresents the uses and values
of the romance convention, while overlooking the historical importance of the fiction’.12 I contend,
building on this, that the uses of romantic conventions by such fictions are key to their historical
importance, as they offer an excellent opportunity for studying emotional practices. I am not especially
interested in questions of the novels’ literary merit here. I follow John Rickard in my approach to my
chosen texts: my area of interest is ‘not one of quality but one of meaning’.13
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In this article, I am going to examine romantic novels written by Australian women published
between 1838 (the date of the publication of Anna Maria Bunn’s The Guardian, the first novel by a woman
published in Australia) and 1860, the year in which the Sydney Mail began to be published, which Pauline
Kirk identifies as ‘[t]he first magazine to encourage locally-produced literature on any scale’.14 These dates
thus bookend a discrete period in Australian literary history. It is a nascent period, and one which has
been called ‘too early for innovation’, because it would have been ‘a radical act to effect any change in
the written forms of [British] culture’.15 To put this another way: the newness and marginalisation of the
Australian colony, and the fact that most texts were mediated and published via Britain, meant that there
were few opportunities to assert a distinctive and characteristic Australian voice. However, the Australian
setting of these books gives them a substantially different chronotopic context, and so I will test this
claim, looking at ways in which British influences were reproduced and/or modified, the different
resonances these might have had with a colonial audience, and what this can tell us about the history of
romantic love in the Australian colonies.16
I will focus my analysis on three novels: Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854), Caroline
Louisa Atkinson’s Gertrude the Emigrant (1857), and Mary Theresa Vidal’s Bengala, Or Some Time Ago (1860).
These are the three most important romantic novels published by women in this period, leaving aside
Bunn’s The Guardian and Caroline Leakey’s The Broad Arrow (1859). I have omitted The Guardian because

11 Ibid., 1341.
12 Debra Adelaide, ‘Introduction: A Tradition of Women’, in A Bright and Fiery Troop, ed. Adelaide (Melbourne: Penguin,
1988), 3. See also Fiona Giles, ‘Romance: An Embarrassing Subject’, in The Penguin New Literary History of Australia, ed.
Laurie Hergenhahn and Bruce Bennett (Melbourne: Penguin, 1988), 223; Fiona Giles, Too Far Everywhere: The Romantic
Heroine in Nineteenth-Century Australia (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998), 1.
13 John Rickard, ‘Cultural History in Australia’, in Books, Libraries & Readers in Colonial Australia, ed. Elizabeth Morrison and

Michael Talbot (Melbourne: Monash University, 1985), 6.

14 Pauline Kirk, ‘Colonial Literature for Colonial Readers!’ Australian Literary Studies 5, no. 2 (1971): 135.
15 Elizabeth Perkins, ‘Colonial Transformations: Writing and the Dilemma of Colonisation’ in The Penguin New Literary

History of Australia, ed. Laurie Hergenhahn and Bruce Bennett (Melbourne: Penguin, 1988), 139.
16 The chronotope is a literary concept made famous by Mikhail Bakhtin. Literally meaning ‘space-time’, it refers to the

spatial and temporal boundaries of a text’s storyworld. Cf. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist,
trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. See also Katie Trumpener,
Bardic Nationalism and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), xii-xiv.
 McAlister, ‘The Literary Text as Historical Artifact’

it is not set in Australia, making it somewhat atypical and less useful for building an understanding of
Australian cultural practices.17 It also seems to have been printed with no intention of sale, which makes
evaluating its emotional resonances difficult.18 Similarly, I have limited my corpus to novels which end
happily (that is, the central couple marries) so that I can analyse the resonances of this ending. Both The
Guardian and The Broad Arrow end unhappily. While an analysis of romantic failure in these texts would
be interesting, I do not have space to undertake it here.
I have selected to analyse only novels by women for a number of reasons. Firstly, women were
and are the gender most associated with sentiment and romance, and so reading books by women
provides an opportunity to explore romantic history. Secondly, the history of colonial Australia is more
often than not the history of (white) men.19 Clive Hamer wrote that ‘the essence of Australian fiction is
the struggle of man against a new, strange, cruel environment’, a position which disappears female
characters and female writers from the Australian literary sphere.20 Reading texts by women repositions
them as important figures and actors, and considering the emotional resonances these texts might have
had for women reveals important aspects of their cultural and historical position. Finally, because of the
uncertainties of the job, few women wrote for publication in colonial Australia, and so the ones that did
were highly individualistic.21 I am interested in identifying commonalities in the emotional discourses
between the three authors I am focusing on, because, due to their individualism, these are likely to be
some of the most revealing aspects of historical Australian emotional culture. In other words: because
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these authors are so idiosyncratic, the places where commonalities emerge are potentially very telling. I
am following Nancy Armstrong here, who suggests ‘making a synchronic slice across apparently unrelated
territories within a given moment in time, in this way, hoping to discover the rhetorical tic that
characterizes the moment under consideration’ as a method for reading literature as history.22
I must pause here to address something both obvious and regularly overlooked in analysis of
nineteenth-century colonial fictions: all of the six romantic hero/ines in the novels I am examining here—
and all the protagonists of the Australian romantic novels of this period—are white. Romantic love is
coded as an emotion only felt by the colonisers, not the colonised. While, as Susan Sheridan has noted,
female Indigenous characters later in the nineteenth century were sometimes endowed with maternal
love, which indicated a shared femininity transcending racial lines, that is absent in the texts in question
here.23 This alerts us to the most sinister aspect of love in the nineteenth-century Australian romantic
novel. Heterosexual love between white protagonists—a love sanctioned at the end of the texts by
marriage and presumably one which resulted in the issue of white children—is one which allows the
colonists to feel ‘at home’ on their stolen land, and to further the colonial project. Interrogating the
politics of race in these novels is otherwise beyond the scope of this paper, but it is important to keep in
mind that the characters allowed access to the emotion of romantic love in a novel is always telling,

17 Patricia Clarke, Pen Portraits: Women Writers and Journalists in Nineteenth Century Australia (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 1988),
1.
18 Elizabeth Webby, ‘Writers, Printers, Readers: The Production of Australian Literature before 1855’, in The Penguin New
Literary History of Australia, ed. Laurie Hergenhahn & Bruce Bennett (Melbourne: Penguin, 1988), 116.
19 Odette Kelada, ‘“As the Past Coils like a spring”: Bridging the History of Australian Women Writers with Contemporary

Australian Women Writers’ Stories’, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 15 (2006): 53; Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda: Woman
and Identity in Australia, 1788 to the Present (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999); Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the
Australian Cultural Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), xii-xiv.
20 Clive Hamer, ‘The Surrender to Truth in the Early Australian Novel’, Australian Literary Studies 2, no. 2 (1965): 113. For

more on the exclusion of women’s fiction from the nationalist tradition, see Giles, Too Far Everywhere, 6-9.
21 Clarke, Pen Portraits, 2.
22 Nancy Armstrong, ‘Introduction: Literature as Women’s History’, Genre 19, no. 2 (1986): 351.
23 Susan Sheridan, ‘Wives and Mothers like Ourselves, Poor Remnants of a Dying Race’: Aborigines in Colonial Women’s

Writing’, Kunapipi 10, no. 1 (1988): 76-91.

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 Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Number 24, 2018

especially when romantic love and reproduction are discursively tied together.
Sarah Pinto writes that ‘the romantic love historian is faced with a research dilemma: what are
the characteristics of romantic love? And what kind of evidence should the historian search for in the
archives?’24 Her proposed solution is to focus more closely on ‘the one element of the emotion that can
be said to cross all boundaries: the romantic couple’.25 I am taking up Pinto’s suggestion, and will seek to
answer the following key questions through my readings of the couples in Clara Morison, Gertrude the
Emigrant, and Bengala: What kind of people fall in love? Who do they fall in love with? What kind of love
do they fall in? How do their lives and their loves interact with the landscape? And what can this tell us
about the history of romantic love in the Australian colonies?

The Australian Romantic Novel: A Brief Overview

In Is History Fiction?, Curthoys and Docker specifically invoke questions of textual form when they wonder
whether the meanings of history are shaped by narrative conventions.26 The same applies when we ask
the question ‘is fiction history?’, for two linked reasons. Firstly, narrative forms develop over time, so we
must understand the historical state of the form to properly analyse fictional texts as historical sources.
Secondly, narrative form is key to shaping the emotional trajectory of the characters, which is key when
doing emotional history. Therefore, before examining the protagonists of the romantic novel, we must
outline the boundaries of the storyworld in which their love story takes place.
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A word on terminology: I am using the term ‘romantic novel’ here to describe, following Pamela
Regis, ‘a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines’.27
Regis applies this definition to the ‘romance novel’. However, the term ‘romance’ was used in a
multiplicity of ways in the nineteenth century, functioning as a kind of catch-all to contain anything which
was not the realist ‘novel’—including, but not limited to, Gothic fiction, sensation fiction, and
melodramas—and is used in this way in the novels I am writing about. Therefore, I have chosen to use
the term ‘romantic novel’ rather than ‘romance novel’ for purposes of clarity.
Clara Morison, Gertrude the Emigrant, and Bengala all follow a central heroine (Clara, Gertrude, and
Isabel respectively) and her journey to find her place in the world. This place is always in the Australian
colonies. For Clara and Gertrude, who emigrate from Britain, this involves physical relocation to Australia
and undertaking work before eventually marrying. For Isabel, who proudly states she was ‘born and
reared in the bush’, this involves a journey of maturation and adjusting to newfound poverty after the
depression of the 1840s bleeds her family of its wealth.28 All three novels thus fit into the genre of the
bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel: the central narrative focus is on building the heroine’s character.
As Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver have argued, the central figure of the colonial romantic novel is the
woman (or, in many cases, the girl).29
This is not unique to the Australian romantic novel, and there is, at first glance, little structural
difference between them and their British counterparts. Fiona Giles writes, Australian women writers
have often been considered to be ‘colonial imitators of better English versions’, and it is easy to see strong
similarities between these novels and other (more famous) romantic novels published in Britain in the
same period.30 Helen Thomson draws links between Clara in Clara Morison and Charlotte Brontë’s
24 Sarah Pinto, ‘Researching Romantic Love’, Rethinking History (2017): 4, 10.
25 Ibid., 14.
26 Curthoys and Docker, Is History Fiction? 3.
27 Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 1.
28 Mary Theresa Vidal, Bengala, or Some Time Ago, ed. Susan McKernan (1860), Australian Digital Collections,

http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/setis/id/p00077, 55.
29 Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver, ‘Colonial Australian Romance Fiction’, in The Anthology of Colonial Australian Romance

Fiction, ed. Gelder and Weaver (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010), 1.
30 Giles, Too Far Everywhere, 1.
 McAlister, ‘The Literary Text as Historical Artifact’

heroines in Villette (1853) and Jane Eyre (1847).31 The structural similarities between Brontë’s novels and
both Clara Morison and Gertrude the Emigrant are clear: all involve a heroine who, orphaned and virtually
alone in the world, must make her own way by working before eventually marrying a man she loves.
Bengala owes more to Jane Austen—the central romance between the young Isabel Lang, who delights in
matchmaking while eschewing romance herself, and the older Mr Herbert, who lives nearby and has
watched Isabel grow up, mirrors closely the relationship between Emma and Mr Knightley in Emma
(1815).32 However, there are also hints of another Brontë in Bengala: the secondary tragic romantic plot
between the convict-cum-bushranger Jack Lynch and maidservant Ellen MacLean strongly resembles
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Ellen’s illness and ensuing death in a dreamlike sequence is
reminiscent of Catherine’s death, while Lynch’s ensuing impassioned speech to Isabel is likewise similar
to the one made by Heathcliff to Nelly Dean (although unlike Heathcliff, Lynch only survives his beloved
by a few days).33
It is unsurprising that Australian romantic novels bore such a strong structural resemblance to
their British counterparts, because many, including Clara Morison and Bengala, were published through and
thus mediated via London. Indeed, contemporary critics noted the lack of national distinctiveness in
these novels. In 1856, Frederick Sinnett wrote of Clara Morison that:
The novel is no more Australian than results from the fact that the author, having been resident
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in Australia, having a gift for novel writing, and writing about what she knew best, unavoidably
wrote an Australian novel.34

Similarly, a Sydney Morning Herald reviewer wrote of Bengala that:

it does not breathe the spirit which pervades colonial life. It is rather a domestic story laid in
Australia than a story founded upon incidents which are either peculiar to, or characteristic of, the
Australian bush.35

Not all reviewers agreed, however. Some praised the reality of the portrayals of colonial life in Clara
Morison and Bengala. One reviewer wrote that, ‘[n]o book of travels, no “sketches,” no express description
of society at Adelaide, would convey so real an idea of the people, their characters, behaviour, and daily
occupations, as is done by the scenes and conversations of Clara Morison’.36 Another wrote of Bengala that
it presents ‘a picture of just such a state of things as one might have expected to meet with in the bush
of New South Wales twenty years ago’.37 Vidal captures both perspectives in the dedication to Bengala
when she writes, ‘[b]ut though life is the same in one hemisphere as in another, the accidental and
surrounding circumstances vary, and there is a more rapid and continual change in a new colony’.38
This idea that ‘life is the same in one hemisphere as in another’, even though the societal contexts
are clearly different, speaks directly to the portrayal of emotional practices. It suggests that, no matter the
chronotopic context, people are people anywhere, and the way they behave will remain the same. Mr

31 Helen Thomson, Catherine Helen Spence (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1987), xii-xiii.
32 Susan McKernan, ‘Introduction’, in Vidal, Bengala, 13.
33 Vidal, Bengala, 309-315.
34 Frederick Sinnett, ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia’, quoted in McKernan, ‘Introduction’, in Vidal, Bengala, 16.
35 ‘Review: Bengala, or Some Time Ago by Mrs Vidal, author of “Tales for the Bush”, “Esther Merle”, “Florence Templar”, &c.

In two volumes. London: John W. Parker and Son, West Strand, 1860’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 August 1860, 2, Trove,
National Library of Australia, http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/13044081.
36 ‘Review: Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia During the Gold Fever. In 2 vols. Published by Parker and Son’, Courier, 28

September 1854, 3, Trove, National Library of Australia, http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/2240055.

37 ‘Review [Bengala]’, Empire, 20 July 1860, 8, Trove, National Library of Australia,

http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/60413560.
38 Vidal, Bengala, 23.

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 Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Number 24, 2018

Knightley will still watch Emma grow up and they will still fall in love, even if their names are Mr Herbert
and Isabel and they fall in love in 1840s New South Wales rather than Regency Highbury. And a young
British woman in need of financial security will still fall in love with a man who is not available to her,
whether her name if Jane Eyre or Elinor Dashwood or Clara Morison, and whether his is Edward
Rochester or Edward Ferrars or Charles Reginald, and whether he has a wife locked in an attic or a secret
fiancée he refuses to break it off with for reasons of honour.
This is not an idea without merit, especially when we consider the strength of the ties between
Britain and the Australian colonies. The latter was regularly imagined to be an extension of the former,
an outpost with all the same values, mores, and norms as the centre of empire. However, this is also
emotionally essentialist and universalist. The notion that people experience emotions, especially love, the
same way, no matter when or where their love story takes place undercuts the critical importance of the
chronotopic context in the construction of the romantic narrative: a context that, despite the similarities
between the centre and peripheries of empire, is certainly not the same. Even if, as William Jankowiak
asserts, love is a ‘panhuman emotion’39—an assertion that numerous scholars have understandably taken
issue with—it would be incredibly reductive to suggest that the way it is articulated and expressed is
similarly panhuman. Thus, we must take into account historical, cultural, and societal context. Regis
identifies the eight elements of the romance novel, the first of which is ‘society defined’ (a society which
is somehow damaged, which is healed by the eventual union of the romantic protagonists).40 While we
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should not take its position on the list as a marker that it is the most defining element of a romantic novel,
we should certainly not deny its importance, and the role that setting and context play in shaping the
trajectory of a love story. Scheer argues that emotions are both something people have and something
they do: ‘we have emotions and we manifest emotions’.41 It is in the manifestation of emotions that we
can most clearly identify nationally specific romantic and cultural discourses, because context intrinsically
affects the way that emotions are performed, and the resonances this performance might have with a
historically and culturally specific readership.
So, how is romantic love manifested in Australian romantic novels? How does the Australian
context affect the romantic narrative? How might this narrative have resonated with a contemporary
audience? To examine this, we must turn to the lovers themselves.

The Colonial Couple

In the opening section of this paper, I posed several questions, the first two of which were ‘what kind of
people fall in love?’ and ‘who do they fall in love with?’ These questions can be taken together, because
the dominant romantic paradigm in these novels is not ‘opposites attract’, but ‘like attracts like’. The
heterosexual romantic relationships in these books are not dependent on an eroticised otherness. Rather,
they are centred on a romanticised similarity. While the protagonists might fall in love on foreign soil,
their romances are made possible because they share common ground.42
Alecia Simmonds argues that romantic love was of ‘enormous public consequence’ in early colonial
Australia, due to its power to either maintain or disrupt social order.43 Given this, the fact that these
romances idealise shared values becomes telling, especially when we consider what these values represent.
39 William Jankowiak, ‘Introduction’, in Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience, ed. Jankowiak (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995), 6.
40 Regis, Natural History of the Romance Novel, 31.
41 Scheer, 195.
42 While four of the six protagonists are emigrants, Isabel in Bengala and Mr Tudor in Gertrude the Emigrant are both born in

the colonies. However, given how early in the history of the Australian colonies these books were written, the landscape is
still an unfamiliar one.
43 Alecia Simmonds, ‘“Promises and Piecrusts were meant to be broke”: Breach of Promise of Marriage and the Regulation

of Courtship in Early Colonial Australia’, Australian Feminist Law Journal 23, no. 1 (2005): 108.
 McAlister, ‘The Literary Text as Historical Artifact’

They are all traits that imply an ongoing connection to the values of empire, but also ones that allow the
couple to flourish on the peripheries—that is, in the colonies. The traits shared by the couples in these
novels make them not only ideal partners to each other, but ideal colonists, partners who will work
together to help forge a new settlement in what was considered to be ‘an unmarked wilderness, a blank
canvas on which the great panorama of civilisation was yet to be painted’ and populate it with further
ideal colonists.44 If, as Penny Russell argues, ‘[t]he risk seemed ever present that the baking heat and harsh
environment might scorch the thin veneer of civilisation from optimistic settlers and draw them back
into some more primitive form of existence’, then we can see the portrayal of shared values in the
romantic novel performing a specific kind of ideological function in the model of romance it upholds.
The couple encourage and reinforce each other’s values, rather than challenging them, which in turn
reinforces the values of empire.
There are three particular areas in which the three pairs of romantic protagonists are strikingly similar,
or come to be strikingly similar:

1. Literary and Artistic Sensibility

In Clara Morison, Clara and Mr Reginald’s very first conversation is a discussion of Dickens at the dinner
table. Gertrude and Mr Tudor find similar literary common ground in Gertrude the Emigrant. For both
couples, a mutual love of reading and a shared taste is foundational for their emotional connection. One
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of the primary ways in which this shared taste is articulated for both couples is in a distaste for romances.
Gertrude reads one and is ‘quite disgusted’, so Mr Tudor advises her not to read any more and shares
religious texts with her instead.45 Clara finds a romance she thinks Mr Reginald has been reading, and is
disappointed: ‘if he admires it, he has not such a fine taste as I had expected of him’, she thinks, and is
mollified when she discovers he did not enjoy it after all.46
Literary sensibility is less important in Bengala, although Isabel’s admission to Mr Herbert that she
has been ‘reading, and reading grave books too’ is a key moment in their romance, as he realises that she
has matured enough to be a viable romantic prospect for him.47 Artistic sensibility, however, is very
important. The misunderstanding that keeps them apart for much of the second volume is his misguided
belief that she has drawn an unflattering caricature of him, as he believes ‘that no woman could so turn
a man to ridicule, if she had the smallest spark of that feeling which would induce her to take him for her
husband’.48 She, ‘whose fault has been loving a joke but too well’, must commit herself to his more serious
sensibilities for their romance to end happily.49

2. Religious Sensibility
It is not surprising that shared religious sensibility is crucial to romantic success in the novels of this
period. As Russell argues, ‘[r]eligious belief and expression shaped the understanding and experience (and
prescribed the limits of) romantic love’ for colonial communities in New South Wales in the first half of
the nineteenth century.50 There is no reason to believe that the situation was dramatically different in

44 Penny Russell, ‘Gender and Colonial Society’, in The Cambridge History of Australia, ed. Alison Bashford & Stuart MacIntyre
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 463.
45 Caroline Louisa Atkinson, Gertrude the Emigrant: A Tale of Colonial Life (1857), Australian Digital Collections,

http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/setis/id/p00076, 39.
46 Catherine Helen Spence, Clara Morison, Vol. I (London: John Parker & Son, 1860), 126.
47 Vidal, Bengala, 46.
48 Ibid., 386.
49 Ibid., 377.
50 Penelope Russell, ‘Love in a Colonial Climate’, in The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia, ed. Hsu-Ming Teo

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other colonies, and I have written elsewhere about the ways in which a mutual Christian sensibility was
vital to the success of the romances in novels by Australian women published slightly later than those in
question here (1859–1891).51
Shared religious sensibility is especially evident in Gertrude the Emigrant, where Gertrude’s
determined religiosity is contrasted with the lax Christianity of everyone else at the station
Murrumbowrie, who are largely lapsed because the nearest church is thirty miles away. The exception is
Mr Tudor, who shares religious texts and has conversations about religion with her. He discusses his
attraction to her in religious terms—he prefers women who have ‘a gentle feminine appearance, the index
of that holy mild influence which a good woman possesses over the rougher sex, that softens the rugged
edges of his temper, and leads his soul to heavenly and higher things’.52 Gertrude’s romantic preferences
also include a consideration of the sacred. She finds herself initially romantically attracted to Charley
Inkersole, one of the workers at Murrumbowrie, and despairs, because he is ‘one of those light hearted,
irreverent sort of persons, to whom it seems impossible to mention holy and sacred themes, lest the gay
spirit should treat them as subjects of mirth’.53
While this sensibility is less evident in the other two texts, it is by no means absent. Bengala has less
explicit conversations about religion, but it is a constant undercurrent in the text. Mr Herbert makes sure
the convicts who work in and around his land are religiously educated, while Isabel attempts to convert
a Catholic priest who has fallen in love with her to Protestantism in a didactic episode about the evils of
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clerical celibacy. In Clara Morison, religion is a frequent topic of conversation between Clara and Mr
Reginald, particularly when Clara is engaged as a companion to a woman who lives alone in the bush.
She begins to write Sunday sermons to give to her, which Mr Reginald comments on and criticises for
her.

3. Work Ethic
Heroes and heroines share a strong work ethic in these books. All three heroes own property, as most
British heroes would, but it is land they actively work and manage. As well as owning his own property,
Mr Tudor is employed as a station manager at Murrumbowrie. Mr Herbert and Mr Reginald are active
participants in the management of their respective properties—Mr Herbert travels between his home
farm Warratah Brush and his station in New England so he can manage both properties, while Mr
Reginald’s commitment to cultivating his property Taringa and consequent refusal to return to England
puts an end to his six-year engagement with his fiancée Julia, who likewise refuses to emigrate.
It is the work ethic of the heroines which is perhaps the most remarkable, and which is one of
the most nationally distinctive elements of these books. Margaret McPherson notes that for English
women, work, especially heavy domestic labour, was not considered feminine; however, due to the nature
and size of the Australian colonies, middle-class women began—and were actively encouraged—to take
on jobs that would have been considered unsuitable in England.54 Both Clara and Gertrude take on
domestic labour. Especially for Clara, this is heavy work which she must learn to do: ‘When young ladies
in novels are set to any work to which they are unaccustomed, it is surprising how instantaneously they
always get over all the difficulties before them … It was not so with Clara, however’.55 However, she

(North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2017), 47.

51 Jodi McAlister, ‘“Feelings like the Women in Books”: Declarations of Love in Australian Romance Novels, 1859-1891’,

Emotions: History, Culture, Society 2, no. 1 (2018): 91-112.

52 Atkinson, Gertrude the Emigrant, 36.
53 Ibid., 62.
54 Bernice McPherson, ‘A Colonial Feminine Ideal: Femininity and Representation’, Journal of Australian Studies 18, no. 42

(1994): 12-3.
55 Spence, Clara Morison, Vol. I, 90.
 McAlister, ‘The Literary Text as Historical Artifact’

gamely rises to the challenge, and her work ethic is ultimately part of her happy ending. Unlike Mr
Reginald’s first fiancée Julia, who broke their relationship off because she could not see herself as a
working wife on a remote bush property, Clara is blissfully ‘industrious without being a drudge’ once she
marries Mr Reginald.56 While Isabel in Bengala is not required to take on domestic labour, she is required
to adjust to new circumstances when her family loses their wealth in the depression of the 1840s, and
begins work as a governess, demonstrating the work ethic and adaptive attitude to labour of the Australian
heroine of this period.

Shared Values
The answer to the questions ‘what kind of people fall in love?’ and ‘who do they fall in love with?’ are,
then, that people fall in love with other people who share their tastes, characteristics, and sensibilities.
These are sensibilities rooted in a determined Protestantism and in a commitment to the realist novel as
opposed to the sensational romance. They are also unafraid of hard work—and, indeed, in many cases,
embrace it. While none of these traits are uniquely nationally distinctive, they are inflected in nationally
distinctive ways. The shared literacy and religiosity of the protagonists is particularly important in a place
in which distance prevents the swift movements of books, and in which churches may be many miles
distant. Likewise, the commitment and celebration of a strong work ethic is unsurprising in a nascent
colony.
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All three traits imply an ongoing connection to Britain. The work ethic expressed might have an
element of national distinctiveness—the heroine who does domestic labour and the hero who actively
works his own land are certainly less evident in British texts of the same period—but it suggests a
commitment to empire-building, to constructing a new colony under the auspices of the motherland.
Likewise, the commitment to literature and to religion, both coded as British cultural products, implies a
desire to construct this new colony in Britain’s image. Elizabeth Webby relates that in 1831, James Ross,
editor of the Hobart Town Courier, argued that ‘reading English novels was almost a patriotic duty on the
part of colonists’—that ‘perusal of such productions … keep[s] alive in no small degree that amor patriae,
that attachment to our mother country and that familiarity with the manners and relish for the habits of
our countrymen which is at all times so desirable’.57 The emphasis placed on literacy and religiosity in
these texts by Australian women would seem to imply a similar ongoing commitment to middle-class
British values and to recreating them in colonial culture. It locates these romantic heroes and heroines as
separate from the Indigenous Australian, who is made abject in these texts, and especially from the
illiterate and irreligious convict, who haunts the textual boundaries. (This is not as evident for the
Adelaide-set Clara Morison, as South Australia was never a penal colony, but is clear in both the other
texts, which are set in New South Wales. It is especially clear in Bengala, where the literate, acceptably
religious, and ultimately successful romance of Isabel and Mr Herbert is shadowed by the illiterate,
irreligious, and tragic romance of Jack Lynch and Ellen MacLean.) And what this also suggests is that
romantic love is itself a learned and imported value, one fundamental to the propagation of the colony.
Without their shared sensibilities in terms of literature and (Protestant) Christianity—sensibilities we can
read as British—it seems unlikely that any of these couples would fall in love.
However, despite the fact that these shared values seem to suggest an ongoing connection to
Britain, none of the texts in question here end in the central couple returning there. Russell notes that
immigrant colonists were ‘at once home-leavers and home-makers’, but this problem is reconciled
56Spence, Clara Morison, Vol. II, 271.
57Quoted in Elizabeth Webby, ‘Reading in Colonial Australia: The 2011 John Alexander Ferguson Memorial Lecture’,
Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 97, no. 2 (2011): 127.
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 Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Number 24, 2018

through the romance.58 By the end of the novels, it is clear that the Australian colonies are home to the
couple—indeed, they end with an affirmation of loyalty to the colony. This affirmation is, I contend, one
of the most nationally distinctive elements of the manifestation and performance of emotions in these
three novels: emotional utterances like ‘I love you’ apply not just to the romantic partner, but to colonial
Australia. Bengala is the text which comes closest to a return to the motherland—after his marriage to
Isabel, Mr Herbert ‘talked of returning to England’.59 However, he ‘lingered’, a decision diegetically coded
as a good one due to the ‘renewed life and prosperity’ brought to the colony by the discovery of gold.60
He eventually settles with Isabel at Langville, the property that her family lost in the depression of the
1840s, effectively bringing their narrative full circle and emphasising that Australia is the ultimate site of
their romantic happy ending. Bengala ends with two decidedly unambiguous words: ‘floreat Australia’ (let
Australia flourish).61 In Clara Morison and Gertrude the Emigrant, the way the romantic love between the
protagonists makes Australia home is even more heavily emphasised. When the colonial-born Mr Tudor
takes English Gertrude to his property Riverside at the book’s conclusion, Gertrude feels that ‘she was
indeed going home’.62 Similarly, when considering returning to Scotland, Clara feels that ‘she could not
bear to leave the country which was his [Mr Reginald’s] home’,63 and the text emphasises their happiness
as a marital unit in the rural domestic space, which Mr Reginald calls ‘paradise’.64 Fiona Giles argues that
heroines in colonial romantic novels ‘negotiate a passage from an English or Anglo-European familial
and cultural background to an Australian commitment which allows, in its most positive form, for the
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coincidence of love and nationalism’.65 That coincidence is certainly in evidence in all three of these texts,
where romantic love for a partner and loyalty to the colony are closely linked. John Carroll, in the tellingly-
titled Intruders in the Bush, notes that one of the struggles of the colonial project was ‘the development of
a feeling of attachment to the new land: that this was home, that this was where we belonged’.66 The
heterosexual romantic narratives in these books allow the heroes and heroines to navigate this struggle.
Australia becomes home because it is the site of romance.

Romance and Mateship: The Ideal Listener

In answering the questions ‘what kind of people fall in love?’ and ‘who do they fall in love with?’ in the
Australian nineteenth-century romantic novel, I have also touched on the other two questions I posed at
the beginning of this paper: ‘what kind of love do they fall in?’ and ‘how do their lives and their loves
interact with the colonial Australian landscape?’ Pinto asks a related question when she enjoins scholars
to consider how the romantic couple operates, which invites a consideration of hero and heroine as a
unit rather than as individuals.67 The way that a couple’s love is articulated—the way their emotion is
textually manifested—is fundamental to this question.
What is immediately obvious about the manifestation of romantic love in Clara Morison, Gertrude the
Emigrant, and Bengala is the way that it is based in shared sensibility, and how this sensibility is expressed
via friendship. All three couples are friends before they are lovers. This friendship is a source of emotional
and spiritual sustenance for all six protagonists long before the establishment of a romantic relationship.

58 Russell, ‘Gender and Colonial Society’, 477.

59 Vidal, Bengala, 413.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Atkinson, Gertrude the Emigrant, 246.
63 Spence, Clara Morison, Vol. II, 206.
64 Ibid., 267.
65 Giles, Too Far Everywhere, 171
66 John Carroll, Intruders in the Bush: The Australian Quest for Identity, 2nd edition (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992),

vii.
67 Pinto, ‘Researching Romantic Love’, 14.
 McAlister, ‘The Literary Text as Historical Artifact’

Indeed, the friendship between hero and heroine is imagined as being more important, serious, and
sustaining than other romantic connections. Gertrude’s initial romantic attraction to Charley Inkersole,
who clearly does not share her literary or (especially) religious sensibilities, is coded as far less important—
to the narrative, and to her—as her friendship with Mr Tudor. In Bengala, Mr Herbert and Isabel
frequently refer to each other as friends. In the first volume, Isabel compares Mr Herbert to her suitor
Mr Farrant and decides that she likes Mr Herbert ‘as a “friend” over and over again the best’ and that
‘“friends” were far pleasanter than “lovers”’.68 There is an implicit understanding that friendship might
be a precursor to romantic love—in Clara Morison, Clara looks to Mr Reginald as ‘her only friend and
adviser’, and he (who has, at this point, a secret fiancée in England) worries about leading her on,
recognising that ‘her friendship was of such a nature, that a word from him might change it into love’.69
However, for the vast majority of all three books, friendship is enough for these couples—it is a
relationship that they all find emotionally satisfying. While there is some romantic longing (especially in
Clara Morison), it is generally articulated as a wish to talk to the other protagonist, to have a conversation.
Physical and erotic desire is almost entirely absent, as is one of the longings which was often imagined in
British culture to take the place of this for women: the longing for motherhood and children. Pleasure is
generated by communication about shared tastes. The diegeses of all three books are dominated by
friendly conversations between the pairs of protagonists.
The answer to the question ‘what kind of love do they fall in?’, then, is companionate love, a love
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based on intimate friendship and communication rather than on physical passion, the eroticisation of
otherness, or the desire for children. While this might not necessarily be particular to the Australian
colonies at the time—the link between friendship and romantic love can also be observed regularly in
British fiction of the same period, for instance—its expression and implications are, I contend, important
and distinctive, especially given the chronotopic context of the colonial Australian novels. Carla Kaplan
argues that much women’s writing is preoccupied with an ‘erotics of talk’, and that while considerable
amounts of scholarly attention has been paid to finding a woman’s voice in literature, we should also seek
the ‘a listener capable of hearing that voice and responding appropriately to it’.70 For the heroines in these
three books, their respective heroes are this ideal listener. Because of their friendly, communicative
romantic connections, they not only hear her voice, but understand, prioritise, and respect it. Mr Reginald
offering comment on Clara’s sermons is an excellent example of this—he does not attempt to deny her
a speaking role that would typically be ascribed to men, but listens to her and seeks to help her improve.
It is this relationship, characterised by talking and listening, that makes the happy ending, complete
with affirmation of nationalistic loyalty, possible in colonial Australia. Clara, Isabel, and Gertrude do not
live in urban spaces—they ultimately live with their respective husbands on rural or semi-rural farms,
which mean their opportunities for society are limited, especially since, as women, they are more restricted
in movement than men would be. Mr Reginald, for instance, warns Clara that they although she should
‘not consider that [she] will be banished from [her] friends and acquaintances’, they ‘will never go out in
company’ after they are married, but will remain largely restricted to his property Taringa.71 The hero is
thus not just the heroine’s friend, companion, and listener, but for most of the time post-maritally, the
only person who can occupy this position for her. Kaplan says that ‘[t]he woman narrator who longs for
an ideal respondent … holds a critical mirror up to the failures of her fictional world and the reader’s

68 Vidal, Bengala, 223

69 Spence, Clara Morison, Vol. II, 199.
70 Carla Kaplan, The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 15.
71 Spence, Clara Morison, Vol. II, 267.

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 Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Number 24, 2018

world as well’.72 Following this, I argue that the fact that conversation and listening are so crucial to the
blissful happy endings of the three heroines suggests a female fear percolating through colonial Australian
society—a fear of loneliness and isolation, and of a lack of intellectual as well as emotional fulfilment.73
Female characters can only be happy—and can only express true and blissful commitment to the colonial
enterprise—when this fear is assuaged, and the need for companionship fulfilled.
Friendship is extremely important in Australian culture, but it is typically a discourse that women
are excluded from. The notion of ‘mateship’ celebrates and elevates homosocial bonds between men, and
is encoded as a defining characteristic of Australian masculinity.74 Indeed, Nick Dyrenfurth contends that
mateship is such a key idea in Australian culture that it offers an alternative Genesis story (Adam and
Steve, rather than Adam and Eve).75 However, while the heroes of these three novels have friendly male
acquaintances, the idea of an exalted mateship is entirely absent. Thomson has discussed this with respect
to Clara Morison, writing that ‘mateship is simply a non-issue as far as Spence is concerned’, that Mr
Reginald ‘is as far from the ethic of mateship as it is possible to be’, and that ‘Charles Reginald is no
Edward Rochester … [he is in] possession of an essentially feminine sensibility’.76 This feminine
sensibility—which is shared by all the heroes and heroines of the books I am discussing here—stands in
direct opposition to a culture that promotes masculinist friendship over romantic love. These three books
rest on the notion that communication between men and women is not only possible, but that they can
understand each other better than anyone else, and that this relationship—not a homosocial relationship
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between men—is fundamental to the flourishing of the colony. If we are to understand emotions
something people do as well as something they have, romantic love is ‘done’ in these books by
conversation: by speaking, listening, and exchanging ideas. In a geographical space where listeners were
scarce, and in a culture where, although nascent, the notion of mateship was becoming the dominant
image of friendship, these books by colonial female authors address colonial female fears by casting
conversation and listening as the primary components of romantic love—an emotion that allows the
colony to blossom and thrive.

Conclusion
Writing about the uses of literature in charting a specifically gendered history, Nancy Armstrong wrote
that ‘[f]iction gave [her] a history of the yearning and anxieties that [she] felt then and still experience[s]
now’.77 The emotive language used here—‘yearning’, ‘anxieties’—is an excellent example of the ways in
which fictional texts can be put to historical use, especially when exploring the histories of emotion.
Reading Clara Morison, Gertrude the Emigrant, and Bengala is of limited use if we are trying to discern the
emotions of specific individuals, even the authors of those texts. However, their role as narrative—
especially as popular narrative—offers us a window into the collective emotional practices and needs of
a society.
Because these texts are all written by women, they offer an opportunity to interrogate the kind of
society that contemporary women wanted—of Armstrong’s ‘yearnings’ and ‘anxieties’. Whether colonial
society as a whole aspired to heterosexual romantic relationships founded on shared sensibilities and
companionate love would require analysis of further novels to see if these emotional practices exist in

72 Kaplan, The Erotics of Talk, 15.

73 Russell, ‘Gender and Colonial Society’, 482.
74 Barry Argyle, ‘Problems of Studying Nineteenth Century Australian Fiction’, in Commonwealth Literature: Unity and Diversity

in a Common Culture (London: Heinemann, 1965), 54; Dixson, The Real Matilda; Schaffer, Women and the Bush.
75 Nick Dyrenfurth, Mateship: A Very Australian History (Brunswick: Scribe, 2015), 1.
76 Helen Thomson, ‘Love and Labour: Marriage and Work in the Novels of Catherine Helen Spence’, in A Bright and Fiery

Troop, ed. Debra Adelaide (Melbourne: Penguin, 1988), 103-4, xv, xiii.
77 Armstrong, ‘Introduction: Literature as Women’s History’, 349.
 McAlister, ‘The Literary Text as Historical Artifact’

more texts (including those written by men). However, if we take into account the idea that the romantic
novel is idealistic rather than realistic—a criticism frequently levelled at the genre—we can uncover some
of the yearnings and anxieties felt by colonial women, especially around heterosexual relations. The
conversational, companionate love represented in these texts can give us an insight into contemporary
cultural fears felt by women, and what needs an idealised romantic relationship might address.
The majority of romantic novels by Australian women were mediated via Britain and also
consumed by British audiences, and so it would be difficult to claim that these fears were entirely
nationally distinctive. However, the chronotopic context of Australia—especially geographically—
influences their articulation and, arguably, their resonances with readers. As Vidal wrote in the dedication
to Bengala, ‘though life is the same in one hemisphere as in another, the accidental and surrounding
circumstances vary’. Even if romantic love is, per Jankowiak, a ‘panhuman emotion’, the manifestation
of romantic love is historically and culturally specific, and as a fantasy, addresses different cultural
concerns.
In The Real Matilda, Miriam Dixson outlines the pervasive misogyny of Australian society, both
historical and contemporary, arguing that Australian women are the ‘doormats of the Western world’.
She ends her introduction by arguing that ‘[t]he game men have set up’ (i.e. patriarchal culture) needs to
be unmade, and exclaiming, ‘[p]ut Eros to work!’78 This notion that romantic love can unmake misogyny
is arguably an idealistic and unrealistic one. However, in the female-authored nineteenth-century
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Australian romantic novel—a genre frequently accused of being idealistic and unrealistic—the particular
brand of companionate romantic love portrayed offers its heroines and heroes ‘relations impossibly
equalised’—something that tells us a considerable amount about, if not the actual collective emotional
standards for romantic love in colonial Australian society, the ones that women wished existed.79

78Dixson, The Real Matilda, 11, 18.

79Alison Light, ‘Returning to Manderley: Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality, and Class’, in Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader,
ed. Mary Eagleton (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 142.
51