Catherine Helen Spence
Journalist & Novelist | 1825-1910
Catherine Helen Spence (1825-1910) is acknowledged in Australia as an important feminist author, journalist, Unitarian preacher and advocate of political and social reform. She was Australia's first female political candidate in 1897. She is now featured on Australia’s five dollar note.
Spence was born on October 31, 1825 in Melrose, Scotland, and educated at Melrose Parish School. In 1839 Spence's father lost everything after speculating on the price of foreign grain and the family emigrated to Adelaide, South Australia. She became a governess and a teacher before she began to make her living from writing. Spence left the Scottish Presbyterian church to become a member of the Unitarian Church and eventually a preacher in her own right.
Spence's main fiction works include Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia During the Gold Fever (1854), Tender and True: A Colonial Tale (1856), Mr Hogarth's Will (1865), The Author's Daughter (1868), Gathered In (1881-82), Handfasted (written 1879, published 1984) and A Week in the Future (1889).
Spence's main non-fiction works include Some Social Aspects of South Australian Life (1878), The Laws We Live Under (1880), An Agnostic's Progress from the Known to the Unknown (1884), State Children in Australia: A History of Boarding Out and its Developments (1907) and An Autobiography (1910). In addition, Spence wrote a wide range of journalistic articles and over one hundred sermons. Spence is, at the time of writing, largely absent from Scottish and British canons. In Australia her critical reputation has moved from being marginalised to now being regarded as a significant female writer in opposition to the traditional Australian canon.
Contributed by Norman Deeley.
Bibliography
Susan Magarey, Unbridling the Tongues of Women: A Biography of Catherine Helen Spence (University of Adelaide Press, 2010).
Janet C. Myers, “‘Verily the Antipodes of Home’: The Domestic Novel in the Australian Bush,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 35.1 (2001), 46-68.
Sarah Sharp, “‘Your Vocation is Marriage’: Systematic Colonisation, the Marriage Plot and Finding Home in Catherine Maria Spence’s Clara Morison (1854),” Scottish Literary Review 11.1 (2019), 27-45.