The Colonial Girl’s Own Papers

Abstract

Best known as the author of the nineteenth-century Australian children’s classic Seven Little Australians (1894) and its sequels, Ethel Turner (Mrs H.R. Curlewis) wrote numerous novels for children and young girls. With her elder sister, Lilian, she ran a school magazine, the Iris, established as a rival publication to Louisa Mack’s Gazette. In 1889 the two Turner sisters started the Parthenon, a sixpenny monthly that ran for three years. Ethel Turner’s most autobiographically inspired novel, Three Little Maids (1899), reflects their experience as writers and editors. Its depiction of frustrations and setbacks as well as of their editorial strategies offers intriguing insight into the production, promotion and consumption of popular publications for colonial girls. This aspect of the literary marketplace of nineteenth-century Australia is seldom the subject of fiction of the time, and Turner’s wryly self-ironic insider view provides a particularly interesting slant. Apart from depicting the practical realities of running a journal, moreover, the novel registers a pervasive ambiguity. Turner’s fiction is invested in the construction of a uniquely Australian childhood and especially a freer colonial girlhood, yet Three Little Maids simultaneously reflects the problems of meeting Australian girls’ changing demands as readers. The girl editors help to engender colonial girlhood by producing a magazine targeted at a local readership. Ultimately, however, the novel embraces a literary marketplace that connects the settler colonies firmly to the imperial centre. Publishing a novel in London is a self-affirmation that upstages colonial periodical publications. It is a triumph for a local writer that needs to be carefully negotiated within a colonial novel.