SOURCE: Lever, Susan. “The Social Tradition in Australian Women's Poetry.” Women's Writing 5, no. 2 (1998): 229-39.

In the following excerpt, Lever stresses the public and social role of nineteenth-century poetry by Australian women, noting a general preoccupation with nation-building rather than introspection.

In the epilogue to her Slip-shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet, Germaine Greer reproaches those women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who fell prey to the romantic demand to expose their female suffering in poetry.¹ These women—from “L.E.L.” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Anna Wickham and Sylvia Plath—are reprimanded for their narcissism and for their choice of a confessional, “self-cannibalising” art over life.

Whether or not she has been influenced by her Australian upbringing, Greer's comments throw light on a quite opposite feature of Australian women's poetry. While “L.E.L.” was inventing Byronic fancies in the 1830s, Eliza Hamilton Dunlop...