1.
1887 in art
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The year 1887 in art involved some significant events. February – Fourth annual exhibition of Les XX, at the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, artists invited to show in addition to members of the group include Walter Sickert, Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot and Georges-Pierre Seurat. The major work shown is Seurats A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, march 26 – June 8 – Third exhibition by the Société des Artistes Indépendants in Paris. November 14 – Paul Gauguin and Charles Laval return to Paris from Martinique, december – Vincent van Gogh arranges an exhibition of paintings by himself, Émile Bernard, Louis Anquetin, and Toulouse-Lautrec in the Restaurant du Chalet,43 Avenue de Clichy, Montmartre, Paris. Bernard and Anquetin sell their first painting, van Gogh exchanges work with Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh begins his first Sunflowers series of paintings in Paris. Walter Crane illustrates The Architecture of Art, Charles Lang Freers first Asian art purchase is a painted Japanese fan. Sir John Everett Millais painting Bubbles is acquired for advertising purposes by Pears soap, february 5 – Albert Paris Gütersloh, Austrian painter and writer. March 23 – Juan Gris, Spanish painter and sculptor, march 25 – Josef Čapek, Czech painter. April 29 – Stanley Cursiter, Scottish painter and curator, may – Jacob Steinhardt, German-born Israeli painter and woodcut artist. May 12 – Leo Michelson, Latvian-American painter and sculptor, may 21 Barker Fairley, English-born Canadian painter, writer, and educator. May 30 – Alexander Archipenko, Ukrainian sculptor, June 20 – Kurt Schwitters, German Dadaist painter and writer. July 7 – Marc Chagall, Russian-Belarusian-French painter, july 28 – Marcel Duchamp, influential French artist. September 24 – Frank Newbould, English poster artist, october 6 – Le Corbusier, French architect and painter. October 9 – Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, Chilean painter, october 13 – Kate Lechmere, English painter associated with the Vorticists and milliner. November 1 – L. S. Lowry, English painter, november 15 – Georgia OKeeffe, American painter
2.
English poetry
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This article focuses on poetry written in English from the United Kingdom, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The article does not include poetry from other countries where the English language is spoken, the earliest surviving English poetry, written in Anglo-Saxon, the direct predecessor of modern English, may have been composed as early as the 7th century. This is generally taken as marking the beginning of Anglo-Saxon poetry and it is possible to identify certain key moments, however. The Dream of the Rood was written before circa AD700, by and large, however, Anglo-Saxon poetry is categorised by the manuscripts in which it survives, rather than its date of composition. While the poetry that has survived is limited in volume, it is wide in breadth, beowulf is the only heroic epic to have survived in its entirety, but fragments of others such as Waldere and the Finnesburg Fragment show that it was not unique in its time. Other genres include much religious verse, from works to biblical paraphrase, elegies such as The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Ruin, and numerous proverbs, riddles. With one notable exception, Anglo-Saxon poetry depends on alliterative verse for its structure, with the Norman conquest of England, beginning in 1111 the Anglo-Saxon language rapidly diminished as a written literary language. The new aristocracy spoke predominantly Norman, and this became the language of courts, parliament. While Anglo-Norman or Latin was preferred for high culture, English literature by no means died out, other transitional works were preserved as popular entertainment, including a variety of romances and lyrics. With time, the English language regained prestige, and in 1362 it replaced French and Latin in Parliament, the reputation of Chaucers successors in the 15th century has suffered in comparison with him, though Lydgate and Skelton are widely studied. A group of Scottish writers arose who were believed to be influenced by Chaucer. The rise of Scottish poetry began with the writing of The Kingis Quair by James I of Scotland, the main poets of this Scottish group were Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas. The Renaissance was slow in coming to England, with the generally accepted start date being around 1509 and it is also generally accepted that the English Renaissance extended until the Restoration in 1660. However, a number of factors had prepared the way for the introduction of the new learning long before this start date. A number of medieval poets had, as noted, shown an interest in the ideas of Aristotle. The introduction of printing by Caxton in 1474 provided the means for the more rapid dissemination of new or recently rediscovered writers and thinkers. Caxton also printed the works of Chaucer and Gower and these books helped establish the idea of a poetic tradition that was linked to its European counterparts. In addition, the writings of English humanists like Thomas More and Thomas Elyot helped bring the ideas, the establishment of the Church of England in 1535 accelerated the process of questioning the Catholic world-view that had previously dominated intellectual and artistic life
3.
Robert Browning
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Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of the dramatic monologue made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. His poems are known for their irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings, Brownings early career began promisingly, but was not a success. His reputation took more than a decade to recover, during which time he moved away from the Shelleyan forms of his early period, in 1846 Browning married the older poet Elizabeth Barrett, who at the time was considerably better known than himself. So started one of historys most famous literary marriages and they went to live in Italy, a country he called my university, and which features frequently in his work. By the time of her death in 1861, he had published the crucial collection Men and Women, the collection Dramatis Personae and the book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book followed, and made him a leading British poet. He continued to write prolifically, but his reputation rests largely on the poetry he wrote in this middle period. Unusually for a poet, societies for the study of his work were founded while he was still alive, such Browning Societies remained common in Britain and the United States until the early 20th century. Brownings admirers have tended to temper their praise with reservations about the length and difficulty of his most ambitious poems, particularly The Ring and the Book. Nevertheless, they have included such eminent writers as Henry James, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, among living writers, Stephen Kings The Dark Tower series and A. S. Byatts Possession refer directly to Brownings work, today Brownings critically most esteemed poems include the monologues Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea Del Sarto, and My Last Duchess. Robert Browning was born in Walworth in the parish of Camberwell, Surrey and he was baptized on 14 June 1812, at Locks Fields Independent Chapel, York Street, Walworth, the only son of Sarah Anna and Robert Browning. His father was a clerk for the Bank of England. Brownings paternal grandfather was an owner in Saint Kitts, West Indies. Brownings father had sent to the West Indies to work on a sugar plantation. Brownings mother was the daughter of a German shipowner who had settled in Dundee in Scotland, the evidence, however, is inconclusive either way. Roberts father, a collector, amassed a library of around 6,000 books. As such, Robert was raised in a household of significant literary resources and his mother, to whom he was very close, was a devout nonconformist and a talented musician. His younger sister, Sarianna, also gifted, became her brothers companion in his later years and his father encouraged his childrens interest in literature and the arts
4.
George Meredith
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George Meredith, OM was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. Meredith was born in Portsmouth, England, a son and grandson of naval outfitters and his mother died when he was five. At the age of 14 he was sent to a Moravian School in Neuwied, Germany and he read law and was articled as a solicitor, but abandoned that profession for journalism and poetry. He collaborated with Edward Gryffydh Peacock, son of Thomas Love Peacock in publishing a privately circulated literary magazine and he married Edward Peacocks widowed sister Mary Ellen Nicolls in 1849 when he was twenty-one years old and she was twenty-eight. Meredith collected his writings, first published in periodicals, in an 1851 volume. In 1856 he posed as the model for The Death of Chatterton and his wife ran off with Wallis in 1858, she died three years later. The collection of sonnets entitled Modern Love emerged from this experience as did The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Meredith married Marie Vulliamy in 1864 and settled in Surrey. He continued writing novels and poetry, often inspired by nature and he had a keen understanding of comedy and his Essay on Comedy remains a reference work in the history of comic theory. In The Egoist, published in 1879, he applies some of his theories of comedy in one of his most enduring novels, some of his writings, including The Egoist, also highlight the subjugation of women during the Victorian period. During most of his career, he had difficulty achieving popular success and his first successful novel was Diana of the Crossways published in 1885. Meredith supplemented his often uncertain writers income with a job as a publishers reader and his advice to Chapman and Hall made him influential in the world of letters. Oscar Wilde, in his dialogue The Decay of Lying, implies that Meredith, along with Balzac, is his favourite novelist, saying Ah and his style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. In 1868 Meredith was introduced to Thomas Hardy by Frederic Chapman of Chapman & Hall the publishers, Hardy had submitted his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady. Meredith advised Hardy not to publish his book as it would be attacked by reviewers, Meredith felt the book was too bitter a satire on the rich and counselled Hardy to put it aside and write another with a purely artistic purpose and more of a plot. Meredith spoke from experience, his first big novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, was judged so shocking that Mudies circulating library had cancelled an order of 300 copies. Hardy continued in his attempts to publish the novel, however it remained unpublished, though he clearly took Merediths advice seriously. Before his death, Meredith was honoured from many quarters, he succeeded Lord Tennyson as president of the Society of Authors, in 1909, he died at his home in Box Hill, Surrey. He is buried in the cemetery at Dorking, Surrey, Meredith had two wives and three children
5.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer. His most famous works are Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a literary celebrity during his lifetime, Stevenson now ranks as the 26th most translated author in the world. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton, who said of him that he seemed to pick the word up on the point of his pen. Stevenson was born at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Scotland, on 13 November 1850, to Thomas Stevenson, a lighthouse engineer. He was christened Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, at about age 18, Stevenson was to change the spelling of Lewis to Louis, and in 1873, he dropped Balfour. Lighthouse design was the profession, Thomass father was the famous Robert Stevenson. Indeed, even Thomass maternal grandfather, Thomas Smith, had been in the same profession, however, Roberts mothers family were not of the same profession. Margarets natal family, the Balfours, were gentry, tracing their lineage back to a certain Alexander Balfour who had held the lands of Inchyra in Fife in the fifteenth century. Margarets father, Lewis Balfour, was a minister of the Church of Scotland at nearby Colinton, and her siblings included the physician George William Balfour, Stevenson spent the greater part of his boyhood holidays in his maternal grandfathers house. Now I often wonder, wrote Stevenson, what I inherited from this old minister, I must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them. Lewis Balfour and his daughter both had weak chests, so they often needed to stay in warmer climates for their health, Stevenson inherited a tendency to coughs and fevers, exacerbated when the family moved to a damp, chilly house at 1 Inverleith Terrace in 1851. The family moved again to the sunnier 17 Heriot Row when Stevenson was six years old, illness would be a recurrent feature of his adult life and left him extraordinarily thin. Contemporary views were that he had tuberculosis, but more recent views are that it was bronchiectasis or even sarcoidosis, Stevensons parents were both devout and serious Presbyterians, but the household was not strict in its adherence to Calvinist principles. His nurse, Alison Cunningham, was fervently religious. Her Calvinism and folk beliefs were a source of nightmares for the child. But she also cared for him tenderly in illness, reading to him from Bunyan, Stevenson recalled this time of sickness in The Land of Counterpane in A Childs Garden of Verses, dedicating the book to his nurse. In any case, his frequent illnesses often kept him away from his first school and he was a late reader, first learning at age seven or eight, but even before this he dictated stories to his mother and nurse. He compulsively wrote stories throughout his childhood and his father was proud of this interest, he had also written stories in his spare time until his own father found them and told him to give up such nonsense and mind your business
6.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
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Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He wrote several novels and collections of such as Poems and Ballads. A controversial figure at the time, Swinburne was a sado-masochist and alcoholic and was obsessed with the Middle Ages, Swinburne wrote about many taboo topics, such as lesbianism, cannibalism, sado-masochism, and anti-theism. His poems have many common motifs, such as the Ocean, Time, several historical people are featured in his poems, such as Sappho, Anactoria, Jesus and Catullus. Swinburne was born at 7 Chester Street, Grosvenor Place, London, on 5 April 1837 and he was the eldest of six children born to Captain Charles Henry Swinburne and Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the 3rd Earl of Ashburnham, a wealthy Northumbrian family. He grew up at East Dene in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight, as a child, Swinburne was nervous and frail, but was also fired with nervous energy and fearlessness to the point of being reckless. He attended Eton College, where he first started writing poetry, at Eton, he won first prizes in French and Italian. He returned in May 1860, though he never received a degree, Swinburne considered Northumberland to be his native county, an emotion reflected in poems like the intensely patriotic Northumberland, Grace Darling and others. He enjoyed riding his pony across the moors through honeyed leagues of the northland border, in the period 1857–60, Swinburne became one of Lady Pauline Trevelyans intellectual circle at Wallington Hall. After his grandfathers death in 1860, he stayed with William Bell Scott in Newcastle, in 1861, Swinburne visited Menton on the French Riviera to recover from excessive use of alcohol, staying at the Villa Laurenti. From Menton, Swinburne travelled to Italy, where he journeyed extensively, in December 1862, Swinburne accompanied Scott and his guests, probably including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on a trip to Tynemouth. At Oxford, Swinburne met several Pre-Raphaelites, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne was an alcoholic and algolagniac and highly excitable. Thereafter, he lost his youthful rebelliousness and developed into a figure of social respectability and it was said of Watts that he saved the man and killed the poet. Swinburne died at the Pines on 10 April 1909 at the age of 72 and was buried at St. Boniface Church, Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight. Common gossip of the time reported that he had a crush on the explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton. The English language is poor in rhymes, and most English poets. Swinburnes work was quite popular among undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge. T. S. Eliot read Swinburnes essays on the Shakespearean and Jonsonian dramatists in The Contemporaries of Shakespeare and The Age of Shakespeare and Swinburnes books on Shakespeare and Jonson
7.
American poetry
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Unsurprisingly, most of the early colonists work relied on contemporary British models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, a distinctive American idiom began to emerge, the history of American poetry is not easy to know. The received narrative of Modernism proposes that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were perhaps the most influential modernist English-language poets in the period during World War I. But this narrative leaves out African American and women poets who were published, by the 1960s, the young poets of the British Poetry Revival looked to their American contemporaries and predecessors as models for the kind of poetry they wanted to write. There are 14 such writers whom we might on that basis call American poets, early examples include a 1616 testimonial poem on the sterling warlike character of Captain John Smith and Rev. One of the first recorded poets of the British colonies was Anne Bradstreet, the poems she published during her lifetime address religious and political themes. She also wrote tender evocations of home, family life and of her love for her husband, edward Taylor wrote poems expounding Puritan virtues in a highly wrought metaphysical style that can be seen as typical of the early colonial period. This narrow focus on the Puritan ethic was, understandably, the dominant note of most of the written in the colonies during the 17th. Of course, being a Puritan minister as well as a poet, a distinctly American lyric voice of the colonial period was Phillis Wheatley, a slave whose book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published in 1773. She was one of the poets of her day, at least in the colonies. The 18th century saw an emphasis on America itself as fit subject matter for its poets. The work of Rebecca Hammond Lard, although old, still apply to life in todays world. She writes about nature, not only the nature of environment, on the whole, the development of poetry in the American colonies mirrors the development of the colonies themselves. The early poetry is dominated by the need to preserve the integrity of the Puritan ideals that created the settlement in the first place, as the colonists grew in confidence, the poetry they wrote increasingly reflected their drive towards independence. This shift in subject matter was not reflected in the mode of writing which tended to be conservative and this can be seen as a product of the physical remove at which American poets operated from the center of English-language poetic developments in London. The first significant poet of the independent United States was William Cullen Bryant, whose contribution was to write rhapsodic poems on the grandeur of prairies. Formed the Fireside Poets were a group of 19th-century American poets from New England, the poets primary subjects were the domestic life, mythology, and politics of the United States, in which several of the poets were directly involved. Other notable poets to emerge in the early and middle 19th century include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Sidney Lanier, and James Whitcomb Riley
8.
Amos Bronson Alcott
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Amos Bronson Alcott was an American teacher, writer, philosopher, and reformer. As an educator, Alcott pioneered new ways of interacting with students, focusing on a conversational style. He hoped to perfect the human spirit and, to that end and he was also an abolitionist and an advocate for womens rights. Born in Connecticut in 1799, Alcott had only formal schooling before attempting a career as a traveling salesman. Worried about how the itinerant life might have a impact on his soul. His innovative methods, however, were controversial, and he stayed in one place very long. His most well-known teaching position was at the Temple School in Boston and his experience there was turned into two books, Records of a School and Conversations with Children on the Gospels. Alcott became friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and became a figure in transcendentalism. His writings on behalf of that movement, however, are criticized for being incoherent. Based on his ideas for human perfection, Alcott founded Fruitlands, the project was short-lived and failed after seven months. Alcott continued to struggle financially for most of his life, nevertheless, he continued focusing on educational projects and opened a new school at the end of his life in 1879. Alcott married Abby May in 1830 and they eventually had four surviving children and their second was Louisa May, who fictionalized her experience with the family in her novel Little Women in 1868. A native New Englander, Amos Bronson Alcott was born in Wolcott and his parents were Joseph Chatfield Alcott and Anna Bronson Alcott. The family home was in a known as Spindle Hill. The family originally spelled their name Alcock, later changed to Alcocke then Alcox, Amos Bronson, the oldest of eight children, later changed the spelling to Alcott and dropped his first name. At age six, young Bronson began his education in a one-room schoolhouse in the center of town. The school taught reading, writing, and spelling and he left this school at the age of 10. At age 13, his uncle, Reverend Tillotson Bronson, invited Alcott into his home in Cheshire, Bronson gave it up after only a month and was self-educated from then on
9.
James Whitcomb Riley
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James Whitcomb Riley was an American writer, poet, and best-selling author. During his lifetime he was known as the Hoosier Poet and Childrens Poet for his dialect works and his poems tended to be humorous or sentimental, and of the approximately one thousand poems that Riley authored, the majority are in dialect. His famous works include Little Orphant Annie and The Raggedy Man, Riley began his career writing verses as a sign maker and submitting poetry to newspapers. Thanks in part to an endorsement from poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Riley gradually rose in prominence during the 1880s through his poetry reading tours. He traveled a touring circuit first in the Midwest, and then nationally, holding shows, regularly struggling with his alcohol addiction, Riley never married or had children, and created a scandal in 1888 when he became too drunk to perform. He became more popular in spite of the bad press he received, Riley became a bestselling author in the 1890s. His childrens poems were compiled into a book and illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy, titled the Rhymes of Childhood, the book was his most popular and sold millions of copies. As a poet, Riley achieved a level of fame during his own lifetime. He was honored with annual Riley Day celebrations around the United States and was called on to perform readings at national civic events. He continued to write and hold occasional poetry readings until a stroke paralyzed his arm in 1910. Rileys chief legacy was his influence in fostering the creation of a cultural identity. Along with other writers of his era, he helped create a caricature of midwesterners, there are many memorials dedicated to Riley, including the James Whitcomb Riley Hospital for Children. James Whitcomb Riley was born on October 7,1849, in the town of Greenfield, Indiana, Rileys father was an attorney, and in the year before Rileys birth, he was elected a member of the Indiana House of Representatives as a Democrat. He developed a friendship with James Whitcomb, the governor of Indiana, martin Riley, Rileys uncle, was an amateur poet who occasionally wrote verses for local newspapers. Riley was fond of his uncle who helped influence his early interest in poetry, shortly after Rileys birth, the family moved into a larger house in town. Riley was a boy, not talkative, who would often go about with one eye shut as he observed and speculated. His mother taught him to read and write at home before sending him to the community school in 1852. He found school difficult and was frequently in trouble, often punished, he had nothing kind to say of his teachers in his writings
10.
Henry Lawson
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Henry Archibald Hertzberg Lawson was an Australian writer and bush poet. Along with his contemporary Banjo Paterson, Lawson is among the best-known Australian poets and he was the son of the poet, publisher and feminist Louisa Lawson. Henry Lawson was born 17 June 1867 in a town on the Grenfell goldfields of New South Wales and his father was Niels Hertzberg Larsen, a Norwegian-born miner. Niels Larsen went to sea at 21 and arrived in Melbourne in 1855 to join the gold rush, Lawsons parents met at the goldfields of Pipeclay. Niels and Louisa Albury married on 7 July 1866 when he was 32, on Henrys birth, the family surname was Anglicised and Niels became Peter Lawson. The newly married couple were to have an unhappy marriage, Louisa, after family-raising, took a significant part in womens movements, and edited a womens paper called The Dawn. She also published her sons first volume, and around 1904 brought out a volume of her own, Dert and Do, in 1905 she collected and published her own verses, The Lonely Crossing and other Poems. Louisa likely had a influence on her sons literary work in its earliest days. Peter Lawsons grave is in the private cemetery at Hartley Vale, New South Wales. Lawson attended school at Eurunderee from 2 October 1876 but suffered an ear infection at around this time and it left him with partial deafness and by the age of fourteen he had lost his hearing entirely. Lawson was a reader of Dickens and Marryat and novels such as Robbery Under Arms and For the Term of His Natural Life. Reading became a source of his education because, due to his deafness. In 1883, after working on building jobs with his father in the Blue Mountains, Louisa was then living with Henrys sister and brother. At this time, Lawson was working during the day and studying at night for his matriculation in the hopes of receiving a university education, at around 20 years of age Lawson went to the eye and ear hospital in Melbourne but nothing could be done for his deafness. In 1890 he began a relationship with Mary Gilmore and she writes of an unofficial engagement and Lawsons wish to marry her, but it was broken by his frequent absences from Sydney. The story of the relationship is told in Anne Brooksbanks play All My Love, in 1896, Lawson married Bertha Bredt, Jr. daughter of Bertha Bredt, the prominent socialist. They had two children, son Jim and daughter Bertha, Henry Lawsons first published poem was A Song of the Republic which appeared in The Bulletin,1 October 1887, his mothers republican friends were an influence. This was followed by The Wreck of the Derry Castle and then Golden Gully, prefixed to the former poem was an editorial note, Lawson was 20 years old, not 17. - In 1890-1891 Lawson worked in Albany
11.
Australian literature
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Australian literature is the written or literary work produced in the area or by the people of the Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding colonies. During its early Western history, Australia was a collection of British colonies, therefore, Banjo Paterson, historians Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey, the playwright David Williamson and leading expatriate writers Barry Humphries, Robert Hughes, Clive James and Germaine Greer. There are also Australian works produced by writers in other than English. Notable contemporary expatriate authors include the feminist Germaine Greer, art historian Robert Hughes and humorists Barry Humphries, among the important authors of classic Australian works are the poets Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, C. J. Dennis and Dorothea Mackellar. Dennis wrote in the Australian vernacular, while Mackellar wrote the patriotic poem My Country. Lawson and Paterson clashed in the famous Bulletin Debate over the nature of life in Australia with Lawson considered to have the harder edged view of the Bush and Paterson the romantic. Lawson is widely regarded as one of Australias greatest writers of short stories, significant poets of the 20th century included Dame Mary Gilmore, Kenneth Slessor, A. D. Among the best known contemporary poets are Les Murray and Bruce Dawe, novelists of classic Australian works include Marcus Clarke, Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson, Joseph Furphy, Rolf Boldrewood and Ruth Park. David Unaipon is known as the first indigenous author, oodgeroo Noonuccal was the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of verse. A significant contemporary account of the experiences of Indigenous Australia can be found in Sally Morgans My Place, Charles Bean, Geoffrey Blainey, Robert Hughes, Manning Clark and Marcia Langton are authors of important Australian histories. We Europeans, wrote Cook in his journal on 23 August 1770, for this he is known as the first Aboriginal author. Oodgeroo Noonuccal was a famous Aboriginal poet, writer and rights activist credited with publishing the first Aboriginal book of verse, Sally Morgans novel My Place was considered a breakthrough memoir in terms of bringing indigenous stories to wider notice. Leading Aboriginal activists Marcia Langton and Noel Pearson are active contributors to Australian literature. The voices of Indigenous Australians are being noticed and include the playwright Jack Davis. Writers coming to prominence in the 21st century include Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, Kate Howarth Tara June Winch, in poetry Yvette Holt and in popular fiction Anita Heiss. Indigenous authors who have won Australias high prestige Miles Franklin Award include Kim Scott who was joint winner in 2000 for Benang, Alexis Wright won the award in 2007 for her novel Carpentaria. Many notable works have been written by non-indigenous Australians on Aboriginal themes, examples include the poems of Judith Wright, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally, Ilbarana by Donald Stuart, and the short story by David Malouf, The Only Speaker of his Tongue. AustLits BlackWords project provides a listing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Writers and Storytellers
12.
Constance Naden
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Constance Caroline Woodhill Naden was an English writer, poet and philosopher. She studied, wrote and lectured on philosophy and science, alongside publishing two volumes of poetry, several collected works were published following her death at the young age of 31. In her honour, Robert Lewins established the Constance Naden Medal and had a bust of her installed at Mason Science College, william Ewart Gladstone considered her one of the 19th centurys foremost female poets. She was brought up by her mothers parents, Caroline and Josiah Woodhill, Nadens well read and devout baptist grandparents lived at Pakenham House, Edgbaston. Her father also lived with the Woodhills for many years, at age 8 Naden was sent to a local Unitarian day school, where she developed a talent for painting. She submitted some paintings to the Birmingham Society of Artists, one of which was accepted for display at the Societys Spring Exhibition in 1878 and she became interested in philosophy, languages and the sciences. Naden also edited the Mason College magazine, from the late 1870s onwards Naden developed a philosophy called Hylo-Idealism in collaboration with Robert Lewins, MD, who she first met in 1876 and corresponded with for the rest of her life. She was interested in Herbert Spencers concept of a philosophy that sought to explain the universe through the principles of evolution. Naden agreed with this, since the theme of unity is central to Hylo-Idealism, which seeks to reconcile materialism and idealism, poetry and science, in 1881, Naden published her first volume of poetry Songs and Sonnets of Springtime. This is a collection, and her sonnet sequence that describes the changing of the seasons is particularly notable. In 1885 she won the Paxton prize for an essay upon the geology of the district and she published a second volume of poetry A Modern Apostle, the Elixir of Life, the Story of Clarice, and other Poems in 1887. She also wrote in the Journal of Science, Knowledge, The Agnostic Annual and she authored many of her scientific and philosophical essays under the signatures of CN, CA and Constance Arden. Also in 1887, she won the Heslop gold medal for her essay, while in India she became interested in its society, particularly regarding equality and the position of women. She returned to England in June 1888 and bought a house on Park Street, Grosvenor Square and she raised funding to allow Indian women to study medicine and became a member of the National Indian Association. She joined the Aristotelian Society, endeavoured to form a Spencer society, on 22 Oct.1889 she delivered an address upon Mr. Herbert Spencers Principles of Sociology to the sociological section at Mason College. She also spoke about the need for womens suffrage at public events, Naden was described as, slight and tall, with a delicate face and ‘clear blue-grey eyes. ’ She was regular and active in her habits. She had a voice, and was thoroughly self-possessed in public speaking. She possessed the tendency to be aggressive and sarcastic in discussion
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