emma_in_dream

Ethel Turner, The Story of a Baby, 1895.


This novella was Turner’s attempt to move into adult writing. It’s the story of a couple who separate and then reunite for the sake of their child. It’s certainly not a strong work and her publishers begged her to return to children’s fiction where she had a huge market waiting for her.


The crux of the novel lies in the heroine’s decision to enter a concert despite her husband forbidding it. She tells herself that 'no on literally interpreted that word "obey" in teh marriage service, now that the equality of the sexes was recognised. It was merely a relic of darker ages when women had been little more than chattels; the progress of the century had made it elastic, before long it would be removed altogether.'


Turner wrote this novel after the wild success of *Seven Little Australians* and before marrying her lawyer beau. If a friend of mine wrote this novella while engaged to be married, I would be extremely worried about them. Additionally, the novella has extra short stories to pad the book out to novel length which address:


A man takes the fall for a woman’s crime and she then marries someone else.
A child is sold to a feckless mother.
A man lies to another man and thereby win’s the hand of the woman they both love.
A wife learns that her husband demonstrates his love for her by beating her.
A wife learns to submit to her husband.
One random happy one about a disorganised household.


This is a pretty grim list of preoccupations on Turner’s mind in the 1890s. Of course, her actual home life was quite difficult. Her step-father was opposed to her marriage and quite keen on keeping her at home. He behaved very oddly at the wedding, pushing her husband out of the way to claim the first kiss of the bride. (Gross).

Both Ethel Turner and Louise Mack, another prominent colonial writer, began their publishing careers at Sydney Girls’ High School by establishing their own magazines. Mack edited the school magazine the Gazette, and purportedly rejected several of Turner’s submissions. In response, 17-year-old Turner began her own rival magazine, the Iris, of which she was “editress” with a supporting staff of 10 friends. The magazine included puzzles, riddles, competitions, letters to the editor and notes on tennis matches, as well as Turner’s budding fiction, poetry and essay writing.

Turner claimed that her subsequent lack of success when she attempted to publish her writing with a “real paper” spurred her once again to found her own magazine, but this time with the aid of her sister, Lilian. The Parthenon was first published in January 1889.

The monthly issues ranged from 24 to 32 pages in length. Ethel and Lilian were not only the magazine’s editors, but wrote most of its content under various pseudonyms: Lilian often wrote as “Talking Oak” and Ethel as “Princess Ida”, her name inspired by a Tennyson poem. The magazine sold approximately 1500 copies per month from a print run of 2000, and continued for a little over three years (39 issues), despite the lengthy distraction of a libel case sparked by a children’s word puzzle competition that was launched against Gordon and Gotch.

The healthy subscription numbers and the regular advertising that the Turner sisters
sought out via a canvasser from the likes of National Mutual insurance, Fry’s Cocoa and W.H. Paling’s pianos meant that the magazine was a viable concern from which the editors often drew an income.

Random fact: The first May Gibbs Gumnut Babies were made on bookmarks that promoted an Ethel Turner novel.

Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce were the two big authors in early 20th century Australia, and they came into most direct competition with their respective World War One trilogies.

Unlike Bruce, Turner did not write mostly about one popular family. For the World War One series she wrote a trilogy about Brigid and Cub who meet on a cruise ship returning from Europe at the beginning of the war. Brigid had lived in Brussels with vain sister and her mother who was a grass widow who eked out her money so she could entertain in the best society. Brigid was separated from the others and in the course of the first days of the war found and adopted a five year old girl whose parents and baby sister were murdered before their eyes (shades of the recurrent baby on a bayonette calumny). They escape because they encounter a rare kind Hun, who says Brigid’s eyes remind him of his girl’s.

Once reunited with her family, Brigid is upset that her mother sees young Josie as a burden. They set off on the cruise ship, where their family strikes up a friendship with the Calthorpes. Mrs Calthorpe is a wealthy widow with two teen aged daughters and a graceless son, the Cub, in tow. Back home in Australia she has another son, a paragon who signs up for the first expedition against her will. He is killed and this (somehow) makes her gung ho for the war. I would have thought it would have exactly the opposite effect.

Cub had wanted to improve living conditions for the poor but instead decides that the right thing to do is to sign up. The first book ends with Brigid waving farewell to the troop ship. In the sequels she falls in love with him, they get engaged, Cub’s best friend who is a penniless inventor dies, Brigid’s mother is reformed and sees that fashionable clothes are less important than serving the country, and there are many appeals for Australians to join up. Turner worked very hard on the pro-conscription campaigns of WWI which I am proud to say failed utterly.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems like Cub’s genius friend should have been encouraged in his invention of what is described as a proto-mobile phone (each device has its own number and vibrates when it is called – it allows easy communication) and Cub should have worked on affordable housing and improved drains. There would have been better long terms gains from this than from the senselessness of WWI.

However, I will say that I like Cub a lot, a deliberately graceless hero. He is abrasive, rude and does not care for conventions. This means he views Brigid as a partner rather than as an angel to put on a pedestal.

I've got a copy of Isabel Maud Peacocke's *Robin of the Round House* (1918) if anyone wants it.

Peacocke was a contemporary of Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce, though writing for a slightly more mature audience. Una and Sylvia are distressed gentlewomen acting as typists when they come into a small inheritance and move into a little house of their own. They adopt Robin, who turns out to be the son of Sylvia's widowed suitor who she then marries.

The book comes complete with recommendations for other Ward Locke books the reader might like - by Turner and Bruce.

If I had been more organised, I would have reviewed *The Secret of the Sea* in April this year, to coincide with the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic.

The story was inspired by the Titanic, featuring two sets of twins orphaned in the sinking of a ship. They get muddled up and no one knows which are the heirs of duke and which are the children of ‘commoners’.

It’s one of my least favourite books by Turner. This is partly because it is incredibly episodic. It starts with a chapter which is effectively an unattached prologue in a different genre. This could stand as a quite gripping short story on its own.

In summary, at nine o’clock at night a junior officer is flirting with a girl passenger and asking her for a ribbon from her shoe. By ten o’clock she is dead, frozen in the water, and he has shot several men trying to storm one of the remaining life boats.

It is gripping stuff, but I do find the racism seriously grating. I know this is how the Titanic was interpreted at the time. Fine, white officers gallantly defending the right for women and children to evacuate first while steerage Italians and Chinese panic and storm the boats. But the racism, intertwined with classism, does, I guess fit with the larger nature/nurture preoccupation of the novel.

The next chapter is another false start. This time we are in the woods as a grandmotherly duchess picks bluebells and thinks about her son who always picked the flowers with her until he ran off with an actress. She is worried that her daughter-in-law is not up to scratch. Then she hears that her son is dead.

Then the third start when the actress daughter-in-law and twin grandchildren are about to be shipped back to England. The boat sinks and you (finally) get to the confused heir motif.

This is such a hackneyed, Victorian plot. Eventually it is determined which is which. In between there is a lot of angst about being 'ill bred'.

And a minor character is introduced, a village boy unlike the other village boys because he is the descendent of Huguenots. He does not look like them and he devours literature on electricity before running off to make his fortune. Which he manages within three months by saving a daring cross-Channel pilot and helping him set a world record. Turner herself says that this is like a nineteenth-century penny dreadful.

(As a side note, I didn’t check the publication date til after I had finished it, but I was sure it had to be between 1912 and 1914. It definitely post-dates the Titanic sinking but the reference to French, British and German authorities working together on the design of airplanes is out of place once you hit World War One.)

So, all the elements hang together to examine nature/nurture. Even the two false starts fit in with this theme. And Turner was consciously addressing the issue as she wrote that it 'was a chance to try to demonstrate that it is the environment and education of the child that mean so much more than birth'.

However, to my eyes, a century later, it's a bit of a flop. I just don't care which one inherits the title and it would seem more sensible to me that, in the absence of DNA tests, they just flip a coin or choose the child who seems best at estate management.

Also, to heighten the difference, Turner has the poor-but-honest family continue to live in poverty which just makes the Duke and Duchess look like asses.

However, it apparently sold consistently well and when re-released in the 1940s in the midst of paper rationing sold 500 copies in the first week.

I ordered an Ethel Turner that I don't have with my birthday money. Then it got lost. So I ordered a copy again from someone else.

Got it. Read it. Now I see why there were multiple copies available on Ebay.

It's a very odd Ethel Turner novel. She usually writes realist, contemporary fiction aimed at the group just sub-flappers (would now be called teenagers). This is a fantasy novel with an Aboriginal man building a raft on wheels and having various adventures with talking animals in the bush.

Interesting, I guess, as I know Mary Grant Bruce made a similar experiment - *Timothy in Bushland* (1912).

More of her works are available online (more than last time I checked anyway):

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=ethel%20turner%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts

On 26 March we are doing Ethel Turner's *The Family at Misrule* (1895).

This is the first note Ethel Turner sent out as 'Chief Sunbeamer' for the children's page of the *Sunday Sun*.

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