Review | Middlebrow Modernism: Eleanor Dark’s Interwar Fiction
Reviewed by Brigid Rooney, University of Sydney
Near the end of her prizewinning study of the interwar fiction of mid-century Australian writer Eleanor Dark (1901-1985), Melinda J. Cooper offers the succinct observation that Dark’s writing issues from “the middle distance of the settler Australian situation” (258).1 The “middle distance” marks an in-between position in time and world literary space that is fundamentally, if ambivalently, constituted by Australia’s distance from cultural centers of the northern hemisphere and by its settler-colonial culture. For Cooper, this quality of “middleness” is central to Dark’s fiction, encompassing its “affiliations with middle-class culture,” its “liberal-humanist commitments,” and its threading together of middlebrow genres with modernist themes and devices (2). “Middleness” expresses, Cooper suggests, a positively relational or dialogic approach that disrupts dichotomies of center/periphery, modernity/colony, nation/world, and high/low culture. For Cooper, the middle distance, conditioned by Dark’s position at the semi-periphery of interwar settler Australia, defamiliarizes hierarchies of Anglophone and European literary modernism and unsettles hard distinctions between high- and low- or middlebrow reading markets.
Eleanor Dark published ten novels as well as short fiction and occasional essays. Her reputation in Australia is founded on two major achievements that at first glance seem divergent but that, as Cooper shows, are logically interconnected. One of these is Dark’s literary engagement with modernism, most strikingly manifest in her innovative second novel, Prelude to Christopher (1934). Blending “fragmented narrative style” (94) with “gothic melodrama” (89), Prelude boldly explores contradictions arising from eugenicist dreams of racial hygiene. The other enduring achievement is Dark’s acclaimed, internationally best-selling novel The Timeless Land (1941), the first volume of an historical trilogy about Australia’s colonial frontier. Founded on Dark’s meticulous archival research, The Timeless Land imagines both sides of the frontier, crossing between the view of British invaders arriving in Sydney Harbour in 1788 and that of First Peoples on the shore. The success of this novel, in Australia and abroad, has occluded attention to its continuities with Dark’s modernist interwar fiction. Cooper’s study, in the vanguard of fresh Australian work on Dark, redresses this problem, revealing patterns of development in Dark’s writing overall and unfolding a complex of interactions between its modernist and middlebrow forms and approaches.2
Middlebrow Modernism studies each of the novels Dark published during, and just beyond, the interwar decades, tracing their successive evolution in response to readers and markets as they circulated at home and abroad. Beginning with Dark’s early-career short stories, Cooper turns to the now difficult-to-obtain first novel, Slow Dawning (1932). Dark was later embarrassed by Slow Dawning, regarding it as too commercial, but Cooper deftly shows its engagement with interwar feminism and its knowing use of romance. Following her chapter on the aforementioned Prelude to Christopher, Cooper turns to the critically and commercially successful Return to Coolami (1936), the first of Dark’s circadian novels. In a journey from city to countryside, the vision of its settler characters undergoes adjustment, moving towards “indigenisation” (115).
In the second half of her book, Cooper tracks Dark’s evolving response to the fraught political climate of the later 1930s. In Sun Across the Sky (1937), a second circadian novel, her canvas expands to a coastal community. With writer and artist set against rampant capitalist development, narrative tensions are resolved through “aesthetic utopianism”—a term Cooper draws from David Carter to identify the attempted overcoming of modern alienation and communal conflict by aesthetic means (138).] Turning to Waterway (1938), the third circadian novel, a work reflective of Australia’s Sesquicentenary year (the 150-year anniversary of British invasion), Cooper explores Dark’s layering of the past in the present and points to the increasing difficulty of resolving class conflict through aesthetic utopianism. The final work discussed is The Timeless Land, published just after the interwar period and marking a shift in form and genre. Cooper’s reading registers both the imaginative power and discursive limits of Dark’s empathetic depiction of Australia’s First Peoples, showing how the novel’s trope of “timelessness” aligns with modernist-derived primitivism. Though bold in its recognition of the historic injustice of British invasion, The Timeless Land envisages a future settler-nation in possession of quasi-indigenous identity, a vision that pre-emptively assumes the extinction of First Nations peoples. In placing the narrative’s appropriative settler desire alongside its brave imaginative leap, Cooper clearly discerns the genocidal impulse latent in this utopian vision.
The betweenness of interwar temporality is amplified by Dark’s location at the semi-periphery of world literary space. Testing varied models of transnational modernism, Cooper favors Susan Stanford Friedman’s multi-directional flows but acknowledges the systemic unevenness of world systems as identified by Pascale Casanova and others. Such unevenness meant writers at the semi-periphery, like Dark, operated under material constraints. In the interwar period, London remained the first place of publication for most Australian books. Like her peers, Dark had first to secure British publication before her novels could circulate in Australia. As Cooper shows, these conditions meant accommodating distant readers and markets. Dark’s best-seller, The Timeless Land, chosen for the US-based Book-of-the-Month Club, coincided with a fashion for historical fiction. Likewise, Dark’s fiction parlayed high modernism through popular genres, forms, and aesthetics. Together with compressed time schemes and multiple perspectives, her fiction relays the pleasures and risks of modernity’s technologies of camera and motor vehicle. Reading Cooper’s book made me appreciate how Dark’s deployment of popular conventions of romance, sensation, and melodrama accompanies an ironic knowingness that includes rather than patronizes readers.
Cooper’s central notion of “middlebrow modernism” proves capacious, opening Dark’s work to complex dimensions of genre, form, and politics, as well as questions of taste and audience. The introduction puts four concepts in play – middlebrow modernism, settler-colonial modernity, regional cosmopolitanism, and liberal humanism. In Cooper’s analysis, these double-barrelled terms, at once opposed and intersecting, unsettle assumptions that have tended to narrow appreciation of Dark’s writing—such as the view that her fiction is not modernist enough, that it lacks political edge, or is nationalist rather than cosmopolitan. Cooper’s study also moves beyond the Australian context to engage questions about the transnational circuits of modernism and world literature, and she situates Dark’s middlebrow modernism in relation to such writers as E.M. Forster, Rebecca West, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Bowen, and Margery Allingham. Building on contemporary Australian scholarship and informed by New Modernist Studies work challenging models of one-way movement from center to periphery, Cooper details how Dark’s fiction both navigated commercial conduits and engaged in multi-directional exchange.
The methodical approach of Middlebrow Modernism does not preclude some spectacular moments. One example is Cooper’s astute reading of an extended passage in Waterway, relayed from the perspective of an ageing professor, in which the narrative shifts flexibly between cosmic and human scales, thus illustrating Dark’s regional cosmopolitanism as a nuanced complex of affiliations with locality, region, natio,n and globe. I was also struck by the close reading, in Cooper’s conclusion, of a poem sent to Eleanor Dark by her friend, the American poet Karl Shapiro. As Cooper explains, Shapiro’s poem mobilizes the oft-used trope of antipodean inversion, invoking ideas of Australian insularity and peripherality. Against the grain, Cooper reads Shapiro’s admiring allusions to The Timeless Land as the trace of multi-directional exchange between writers.
What unfolds through Middlebrow Modernism is a suite of concepts speaking to relations among opposed or unlike categories from a position “in between.” Cooper gives compelling effect to her titular claim, enriching understanding of Dark’s achievement and her significance for readers of Australian literature. Cooper’s study joins a resurgence of Australian scholarly interest in Dark’s writing and career,4 while placing her work in dialogue with scholarship on the middlebrow otherwise centered on the Anglo-American nexus. Middlebrow Modernism shows the appeal, value, and importance of Dark’s fiction for readers beyond Australia, and for the intersecting contemporary fields of transnational and world literature and New Modernist Studies.
Notes
1. Middlebrow Modernism: Eleanor Dark’s Interwar Fiction won both the 2023 Australian University Heads of English Prize for Literary Scholarship and the Association for the Study of Australian Literature’s (ASAL’s) 2023 Alvie Egan Award for a best first book of literary scholarship.
2. See Fiona Morrison and Brigid Rooney, Time, Tide and History: Eleanor Dark’s Fiction (Sydney UP, 2024), the first book-length collection of essays on Dark. Melinda J. Cooper has contributed a chapter to this collection.
3, Carter presents and applies this concept in his study of mid-century Australian writer Judah Waten: A Career in Writing: Judah Waten and the Cultural Politics of a Literary Career (Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1997).
4. In addition to the book of essays on Dark’s fiction edited by Morrison and Rooney (see n2), David Carter and Roger Osborne discuss the American reception of Dark’s fiction in their book Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s-1940s (Sydney UP, 2018).