Beatrice Grimshaw and Australia - White Women in the Pacific

Author
Publication year
1993
Journal
Olive Pink Society Bulletin
Volume
5.1
Pages
34-39
Comment

A transcript of the article can be found at the second link (you'll have to scroll down quite a long way, or search for the title of the article), along with details of other articles about Grimshaw. I have only included this one in the database because of its mentions of her novels published by Mills & Boon.

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while women’s travel narratives sometimes personify and articulate a woman’s personal journey of liberation from patriarchal oppression back home, that ‘Self-assertion in a Victorian traveller did not automatically imply that she extended the same principle to others’ (Kroller 1990:89; Stevenson 1982:2). Least of all, to those indigenous women against whom the situation of white European women was so often compared. (34)

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Grimshaw was a prolific travel writer, columnist, publicist and novelist who wrote extensively about the Pacific at the beginning of the twentieth century. While the way she chose to live her own life represented an explicit challenge to traditional English notions of femininity, her writings clearly illustrate Kroller’s argument about the ways in which the self-assertion of many women travellers did not extend to the colonised women they wrote about. (34-35)

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In asserting an imperialist ideology which is fundamentally patriarchal she both asserts and contests her own status as colonised – as woman, as Irish and as Australian. Her contestation of prevailing notions of femininity, particularly within the confines of marriage, pervades her novels and is at times surprisingly explicit in its subversiveness. In the novels, however, ultimately her ‘feminist’ discourse surrenders to the patriarchal discourse on ROMANTIC LOVE and once her independent, feisty woman hero meets her ideal man she quite happily and willingly submits to the inferior status accorded to her future life. True love makes submission and inferiority worthwhile. (36)

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Clearly Grimshaw’s ‘feminism’ as expressed in the text of her novels is problematic. Not only does it ultimately assume the acceptable and safe interrogation of patriarchy so common in Mills and Boon publications (and indeed, some of her early novels were published by Mills and Boon), but more importantly, her interrogation of women’s position is explicitly contingent upon a notion of woman = white woman. (36)