Show Notes
Ruth Park’s debut novel, The Harp in the South, was first serialized in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1947, provoking angry letters from outraged readers. The book was destined to become an Australian classic. The story follows an Irish Catholic immigrant family - the Darcys - living in the inner-city slum of Surry Hills, as they navigate domestic violence, child prostitution, racism, backstreet abortions, abduction, and alcoholism. Some readers objected to Park’s frank depiction of these social ills. Others claimed her story was exaggerated. And there was general outrage that an outsider - a blow-in from New Zealand, no less - should assume the right to air Sydney’s dirty laundry for all to see.
But The Harp in the South is not a judgmental or moralizing novel. Park, who was living in Surry Hills at the time, simply depicted the world around her. There is no traditional plot to the story. We simply join the Darcys for around three years of their lives and grow to love them despite their flaws. Park finds beauty in the everyday and her prose is often most beautiful when describing unbelievable squalor. Her descriptions of rubbish and dirt are second to none.
In this second episode in our Classic Australia season, we take a leap from Miles Franklin’s charming, sometimes naive, turn-of-the-century rural bildungsroman to Ruth Park’s urban, immigration story that became a template for many of the great Australian novels of the last fifty years, including Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap (more on that in a few weeks) and Tim Winton’s Cloud Street. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Secret Life of Books
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In 1901, six self-governing British colonies in the Southern Hemisphere came together to form a single nation - Australia. In that same year, a 21-year-old woman from rural New South Wales published a book which gave voice to that new nation. The woman is the great Miels Franklin, and the book is My Brilliant Career. The novel’s heroine Sybylla Melvin, immortalized in the 1979 film by Judy Davis, is ebullient, clever, defiant, funny and brave. It’s a gripping story of her farming childhood, her family’s descent into poverty, her romance with a handsome jackaroo called Harry Beacham and - most of all - her determination to forge a career as an independent artist.
Diana Reid is the hottest young screen adaptation-writer of the hour, and she wrote the screenplay for the delightful new Sense and Sensibility film with Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esme Creed-Miles. Today she's joining us on SLOB to talk rom-coms, wild hair, muslins, ribbons, and learning self-restraint. The story of how we got Diana on our show is almost as meet-cute as the story of how she came to write the screenplay. You'll hear the whole story, and we'll go in deep on how Diana went from being a novelist to screenwriter almost overnight, and how Jane Austen herself taught her how to write the beats of a gripping story about two sisters who seem to be opposites and learn how to be more like one another. This version of Sense and Sensibility is true to the original and also windblown and yearningly impassioned, as any good modern rom-com should be. Hear about how Diana, along with the producer, director and actors made the magic happen as a team, over several months of shooting on location in the UK. Diana now lives in London, but grew up in Sydney, and indeed seems to have led a shadow life to Sophie. Diana's first novel, Love and Virtue, is set on the campus of Sydney University, and reminded Sophie not a little of her own heady days as an undergraduate. We talk about how novel-writing prepared Diana for screen-writing, and about how she managed to write three such different, accomplished, page-turning novels and a successful screenplay all before her 30th birthday! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
If you're wondering who this Anne Carson person is who just won the Nobel Prize, then SLoB is here to help. In this punchy 20-minute primer, we give you all the vital statistics and some choice extracts from Carson's poetry so you can sparkle and shine when her name comes up - as it surely must - at the weekend dinner table/pub/supermarket queue. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Elizabeth Gaskell might be the most underrated novelist of the 19th century. North and South was first published by Charles Dickens in Household Words from 1854-55. But Dickens and Gaskell came to blows over his heavy-handed editing style and misguided ending change. Manchester-based novelist Gaskell fought back against Dickens’ way of telling stories, to make the industrial working classes properly visible for the first time in literary history. She didn’t tell the Establishment what it wanted to hear, and she was considered a nuisance. Even The Leader - a radical newspaper that should have supported her - condemned North and South, saying that a woman could not ‘understand industrial problems’ and therefore had ’no right to add to the confusion by writing about it.’