From bohemia to the bush : the work of Mrs Campbell Praed

Abstract

This thesis situates Rosa Praed, writing as Mrs Campbell Praed, within the late Victorian literary field, a positioning that has generally not been clearly articulated in the focus on her status as a colonial writer. The thesis shows that Praed’s works mediate the colony within empire as much as reflect the empire’s ideology back to the colony or describe it to the imperial centre. The conditions of production of her work, the figuration of the colonial heroine and the reception of her novels are explored in order to demonstrate the impossibility of viewing feminine as well as colonial culture as separate or distinct from late nineteenth-century British and imperial culture. The reception of Praed’s work demonstrates cultural anxieties around female behaviour, which are inflected by the colonial setting of the novels. By examining the contribution these works made to contemporary discourses of gender, sexuality and colonialism, it is argued that the colony occupies a specific site in the cultural imaginary in relation to female development. In arguing that Praed's works were constructed in relation to such discourses, and contributed to their formation, the thesis contends that ideas about authorship, too, are illuminated. A consideration of Praed’s positioning as a successful and popular fiction writer in the literary and cultural milieu of London in the 1880s and the writing practices she engaged with reveal authorship to be a process of negotiation. It is argued that the ‘position-taking’ of an expatriate colonial writer such as Praed was based on specific strategies of placement both within and on the margins of the imperial centre. It is also argued that Praed’s writing processes present a challenge to concepts of authority. Research into Praed’s writing practices, particularly her literary collaboration with Justin McCarthy, provides further evidence about the management of the positioning of the author. Finally a cultural context for the partnership between Praed and Nancy Harward and the spiritual and writing work they undertook together is proposed which takes into account the social and cultural operations of spiritualism and early twentieth-century discourses around lesbian sexuality. It is argued that the construction of a writing partnership in relation to these discourses constitutes another set of negotiations, reconfiguring again ideas of authority. The thesis argues that if the concept of the colonial periphery is reconstituted as central within the structure of empire and ideas of female behaviour, then these borderlands, too, collapse boundaries about sexuality and desire, spirituality and, again, authority.