Eleanor Dark

Australian novelist and essayist.

• Born: August 26, 1901
• Birthplace: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
• Died: September 11, 1985
• Place of Death: Katoomba, New South Wales, Australia

Biography

Eleanor Dark was born Eleanor O’Reilly in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, on August 26, 1901. Her father was a flamboyant poet and politician, and her mother was a schoolteacher. Financial difficulties, marital tensions, and her mother’s frail health shadowed Dark’s childhood, but she was a voracious reader and decided early on to be a writer. In 1923, she and her husband, physician Eric Dark, moved to Katoomba near the Blue Mountains, where Dark, always athletic, adapted to the land and first tapped her fascination with the vast Australian countryside.

Dark published several stories and poems, many under pseudonyms, and her first novel, Slow Dawning, a formulaic romance that she would later regret publishing. However, her later book, Prelude to Christopher (1937), defined Dark as a novelist of enormous promise. A controversial work, it centered on the marriage between a doctor, establishing a utopian eugenics colony in the South Pacific, and his wife, whose complicated mental history causes him to reject her as a potential mother; this act, coupled with the isolation of the island, sends her spiraling into madness and ultimately suicide. Awarded the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the work brought to the Australian literary community Dark’s respect for European modernism, particularly Thomas Mann’s novels of ideas and Virginia Woolf’s narrative formalism.

After publishing several similar novels, Dark was asked to write an essay on women and Australian history, which triggered an interest in the collision between white settlers and Aboriginal Australians. The result would be The Timeless Land, the first (and most successful) of what would become Dark’s trilogy of epic novels charting Australian history from the arrival of white settlers to the first settlements near Dark’s own Blue Mountains (roughly 1813). Unlike her earlier novels, the mood of these books is expansive, the narrative voice detached, the detailing rich, the characters, both native and European, set against the land itself. Dark saw her historical novels, so meticulously researched, as a gift of community identity to her nation.

However, in the tense political atmosphere of postwar Australia, Dark and her husband, who had both long espoused leftist political agendas, were targeted as communists by a parliamentarian investigation in 1947. The unfounded charges upset their lives, but they continued to speak out against government corruption. Dark, however, grew increasingly depressed by the futility of such uncompromising activism. Finishing the trilogy in 1953, Dark published only one other novel until her death on September 11, 1985. Her final book, Lantana Lane, was a slender novel about a struggling farm that was an obvious metaphor for Dark to test capitalism and communism.

During the feminist renaissance of the late 1970s, Dark was recognized for her place in Australian letters when she was awarded the 1977 Order of Australia. By the time of her death, however, she was largely forgotten. Dark’s major achievements were to introduce the structural complexity of European modernism to the Australian novel and to bring the massive sweep of the epic to Australian history.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Slow Dawning, 1932

Prelude to Christopher, 1934

Return to Coolami, 1936

Sun Across the Sky, 1937

Waterway, 1938

The Timeless Land, 1941

The Little Company, 1945

Storm of Time, 1948

No Barrier, 1953

Lantana Lane, 1959

Bibliography

Brooks, Barbara, and Judith Clark. Eleanor Dark: A Writer's Life. Macmillan, 1998. The chief full-length biography of Dark.

Day, Arthur Grove. Eleanor Dark. Twayne, 1976. An basic biography of Dark, published around the time that the feminist movement sparked a resurgence of interest in the author.

McQueen, Humphrey. "Eleanor Dark—Disturbing the Status Quo." Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Canberra Region, 17 May 2011, labourhistorycanberra.org/2015/04/eleanor-dark-disturbing-the-status-quo/. Accessed 19 Jun. 2017. Transcript of a talk given in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the Varuna Writer's Center, founded at Dark's home in Katoomba; it discusses Dark's liberal outlook, including McQueen's personal experience with the author.

Wyndham, Marivic. "Dark, Eleanor (1901–1985)." Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2007, adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dark-eleanor-12400/text22291. Accessed 19 Jun. 2017. Provides a comprehensive overview of Dark's life, including discussion of her major works.

Wyndham, Marivic. 'A World-Proof Life': Eleanor Dark, a Writer in Her Times, 1901–1985. UTS ePress, 2007. A biography placing Dark as an important writer in the context of twentieth-century Australia.