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The Anthology of Colonial Australian Romance Fiction. Ed. Ken Gelder & Rachael Weaver. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2010. 278pp. ISBN 9780522856163 (pbk) AU$34.99
This new anthology follows two others by the same editors dealing with colonial Australian Gothic fiction and crime fiction respectively. The genre it represents was far and away the most popular with colonial Australian writers and, one assumes, readers. In the 1980s, at the height of the interest in work by women writers, I edited with a New Zealand colleague, Lydia Wevers, two anthologies of stories by Australian and New Zealand women. To find material for the first volume, which spanned much the same timeframe as Gelder and Weaver's, we trawled through the columns of many then little-read newspapers and magazines. With very few exceptions, such as the detective stories of Mary Fortune, we found that women were writing love stories, hence our choice of the title Happy Endings, from a story by Rosa Praed called 'A Happy Ending'. Hence, too, our decision to call the second volume, covering the 1930s to the 1980s, Goodbye to Romance, to signal the rejection of the romance genre by most of the writers included in it.
Gelder and Weaver were, of course, not restricted to stories by women, though more women than men are represented in their anthology. Of the 18 stories they have chosen, half were written by women, seven by men and two are anonymous, though their content and the pen names used suggest that one was probably by a man and the other by a woman. In the case of some of the stories by men, too, one might quarrel with their classification under the romance genre, or at least want to argue for a distinction between 'adventure romance' and 'domestic romance'. In adventure romance, predominantly written by men, the story centres on the adventures of the male characters and the love interest is secondary, as for example in Rolf Boldrewood's Robbery Under Arms. In domestic romance, predominantly written by women, the story centres on female characters, and especially on their success or failure in marrying the right man. Gelder and Weaver ignore this distinction, claiming in their introduction that, although works by men have been included in the anthology,'The central figure of...