The story of four remarkable women traversing the literary landscape of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Australia, from one of our nation's most eminent historians.
Brenda Niall is one of Australia’s foremost biographers. She is the author of five award-winning biographies, including her acclaimed accounts of the Boyd family and her portrait of the Durack sisters, True North. In 2016 she won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal and the National Biography Award for Mannix. In 2004 she was awarded the Order of Australia for ‘services to Australian literature, as an academic, biographer and literary critic’.
‘Deeply absorbing, fascinating and moving…now for the first time I
have a sense of the women behind me…I loved the tone—detached and
masterly but with a light touch, and a wit that’s sharp but never
cruel; and always sympathetically attuned to the strain of the
women’s attempts to find a balance between their inner and outer
lives.’
*Helen Garner*
‘Few other writers have such an ability to understand and describe
the relationships that create the characters of her subjects.’
*Sydney Morning Herald*
‘Brenda Niall is in a class of her own…Her books have all been
works of insight and substance, their observations carefully
considered.’
*Michael McGirr, Age*
‘Friends and Rivals goes beyond solitary portraiture and linear
catalogue to place its subjects in their landscape...Rich and
digressive, these portraits are open-seamed, their complex maps
pointing towards other layers, other stories, named experience
alongside the unnamed and the unnameable, elision and fiction
jostling.’
*Saturday Paper*
‘[A] formidable combination of meticulous scholarship,
reader-friendly lucidity, and ideas...about the nature of feminism,
biography, and Australian literary and cultural history, and about
the many places where those things intersect.’
*Australian Book Review*
‘Among living Australian biographers, only Philip Ayres matches
Brenda Niall for painstaking research serving narratives at once
spirited and judicious…Dr Niall ignores nothing.’
*Spectator*
‘An entertaining exploration of the overlapping lives of four of
Australia’s most admired women writers.’
*Inside Story*
‘Elegant, incisive and readable’
*Australian*
‘This joint biography uses previously hidden material, now in the
hands of a more than gifted author who takes us on a literary
journey to find out what we’ve been missing.’
*Herald Sun*
‘An immaculately researched and highly readable group
portrait…Brings the Australian literary world in the first half of
the last century to life, while reminding us how little has changed
about human nature.’
*Nib Literary Award judges’ comments*
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