Australian women writers’ popular non-fiction prose in the pre-war period: Exploring their motivations

Since the 1970s, feminist scholars have undertaken important critical work on Australian women’s writing of earlier eras, profiling and promoting their fiction. Less attention has been afforded to the popular non-fiction produced by Australian women writers and, in particular, to that produced before the Second World War. Yet this writing is important for several reasons. First, the non-fiction writing of Australian women was voluminous and popular with readers. Second, this popular work critically engaged with a tumultuous political, social and moral landscape in which, as women’s rights were increasingly realized through legislation, the subjectivity of women themselves was fluid and contested. Third, as many of these women were also, or principally, fiction writers, their non-fiction can be shown to have informed and influenced many of their fictional interests, themes and characters. Lastly, and critically, popular non-fiction publication helped to financially sustain many of these writers. In proposing a conceptual framework informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu to analyse examples of this body of work, this article not only suggests that important connections exist between popular and mainstream non-fiction works – newspaper and magazine articles, essays, pamphlets and speeches – and the fictional publications of Australian women writers of the early twentieth century but also suggests that these connections may represent an Australian literary habitus where writing across genre, form and audience was a professional approach that built and sustained literary careers.