Varieties of Courage

Abstract

Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife). Christina Stead. New York, Random House, 1976. pp.308.
A Fringe of Leaves. Patrick White. London, Jonathan Cape, 1976. pp.404.

These latest novels from Australia's foremost senior writers both take a woman for their central figure and around her create an experience of human courage. They are quite different novels. Christina Stead's Eleanor Herbert, an educated Londoner, steadily denies the dimension of life that Patrick White's Ellen Gluyas perceives from the beginning of her story as a Cornish farm-girl. This review will not give a detailed commentary on the novels but will concentrate on the central women. Patrick White's novel is based for fact on the adventures of Eliza Ann Fraser among the aborigines of the south-Queensland coast when the Stirling Castle under the command of her husband James Fraser was wrecked
there in 1836. Important incidents in the novel, including the fringe of leaves which the wife strung round her waist and in which she hid her wedding-ring, are taken from the actual story of Mrs Fraser, and it is interesting to observe how an artist makes use of fact when the novel is compared with other accounts, for example, with Michael Alexander's Mrs Fraser on the Fatal Shore, (London, Michael Joseph, 1971).

A Fringe of Leaves, however, has the quality of an allegory. In real life Mrs Eliza Fraser seems to have been rather closer to Eleanor Herbert than to Patrick White's Ellen Gluyas, later Roxburgh. Christina Stead's work has the quality of realism: both novels are very powerful and in their strong sympathy persuade the reader to a greater understanding of human nature. It is probably only coincidence that the name "Ellen" is the Anglo-Saxon word for "strength", "valour", and "courage", and that "Eleanor" has the appearance of being a cognate word. Both novels are essentially concerned with varieties of human courage, especially as it is exacted from women in different societies and circumstances: Ellen and Eleanor are sensual and maternal women who, without moving beyond the socially prescribed feminine roles, struggle for self-realization in inimical and painful environments.