SOURCE: Bird, Delys. “Towards an Aesthetics of Australian Women's Fiction: My Brilliant Career and The Getting of Wisdom.” Australian Literary Studies 11, no. 2 (October 1983): 171-81.

In the following essay, Bird presents My Brilliant Career and The Getting of Wisdom as two “incipiently subversive novels” that depict the struggles of women in a society that generally diminishes feminine social value.

Following the resurgence of the women's rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s in the English speaking world, an explosion of both formal and informal speculation and assertion regarding the ‘difference’ of the feminine, and demanding recognition and authentication of the woman's voice in literature and in literary criticism has given rise to a new and increasingly credible academic industry. Critical questions which depend on the central assumption of this activity derive from the problem of how women's writing may be specified; whether it is possible, or indeed useful or...