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The Literary Dawn: Re-Reading Louisa Lawson's Poetry and Politics

2014; Springer International Publishing; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

0311-4198

Katie Hansord,

Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies

Woman is not uncompleted man but says Tennyson, and being diverse, why should she not have her journal in her divergent hopes, aims and opinions may have representation.(Lawson, About Ourselves 1).Scholarship on Lawson and the Dawn has necessarily often focussed on the important and wide-ranging achievements of her feminist work for women's legal, social and political rights. Indeed, as Audrey Oldfield notes, Louisa Lawson one of the most important figures in the New South Wales woman suffrage (261). However, I want to focus here on the periodical publishing context of the Dawn as a means of pointing to further discussions of Lawson's significance as a poet. Megan Roughley has noted that the Dawn was a forum for political causes, especially the movement for the emancipation and enfranchisement of women, and, as importantly to Louisa, the temperance (ix), with influential articles appearing on a wide range of important issues including divorce reform. Yet, Lawson's construction of the Dawn also highly literary from its first issue, with editorial choices and literary references reflecting her awareness of political and feminist literary culture. In addition to references such as the above quotation from Tennyson, Lawson included an epigraph from Joseph Addison's play Cato in the list of contents: A day, an hour, in virtuous liberty, is worth a whole eternity in bondage. Citing Addison, a significant figure in the American Revolution, demonstrates Lawson's linking of radical class politics with feminism, as well as highlighting the importance of literary dialogues to Lawson's publishing work. Likewise, the concerns of Lawson's poetry are clearly situated within a continuing female tradition, and Lawson's poetry, when examined in the feminist literary context of the Dawn, reveals a radical and sophisticated poetics.A prominent Australian feminist, poet, writer and editor, among various other occupations, Lawson published the all womenrun journal, the Dawn, between 1888 and 1905. Lawson's collection The Lonely Crossing and Other Poems, which she herself printed at the Dawn office just before it closed in 1905, not published again until 1996, when it reproduced in Lawson: Collected Poems with Selected Critical Commentaries (Roughey v).1 Alexis Easley notes that:Most major nineteenth-century women authors ... made significant contributions to the periodical press. Their involvement in periodical journalism had important implications for their book length works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. (1)From the first issues, Lawson included a Poet's Page in the Dawn, featuring a few poems, generally between two and four depending on length, and these included her own poems.2 The periodical press is, therefore, central to and an extremely important part of Lawson's poetic production.The contextual importance of the Dawn's Poet's Pages and the poetic culture Lawson's poetry engaged with, is effaced when her poetry is considered only in terms of her volume, The Lonely Crossing and Other Poems. From the early issues of Dawn, the periodical the original publishing context for many of the poems in her volume. The Poet's Page on 1 July 1895, for instance, included four Way-side poems by Lawson, given by request: Mountain Flowers, Sunset, A Reverie and Woman's Love. These appeared alongside a wide range of other poets, such as Christina Rossetti, Bulwer Lytton, and Jean Ingelow. Other periodical poets included Charles Folien Adams, and American women poets such as Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Edith M. Thomas, Ellen Palmer Allerton, Sarah Chauncy Woolsey, Julia C.R. Dorr, Ethel Lynn, and Kate Tannatt Woods.3 While the content of articles, particularly on women entering the workforce, is overtly feminist in the Dawn, Lawson's poetry has been seen as less politically committed. However, the intellectual engagement with radical philosophical movements in the latenineteenth century, evident in periodicals such as the Dawn, is intrinsic to Lawson's poetry. …