Catherine Helen Spence’s Autobiography: Literary Culture and Associational Life in Nineteenth-Century South Australia

Abstract

This article examines Catherine Helen Spence’s Autobiography through the lens of settler colonial sociability. It argues that Spence strategically depicts associational life in the Autobiography to showcase for her readers a version of organized settler colonial sociability that envisages a role for White, middle-class urban women in the construction and expansion of settler colonial Australia. Spence’s literary and political sociability extends between Australia, Britain and the US. While it is transnational in scope, however, at the same it is exclusionary in its politics: as its very foundation rests on the exclusion of the White working classes and Australian Indigenous peoples.