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Education and work in service of the nation: Canadian and Australian girls' fiction, 1908-1921
This chapter compares early twentieth-century Australian novels by Ethel Turner, Mary Grant Bruce, and Lilian Turner to Canadian novels by Nellie McClung and L.M. Montgomery to demonstrate important differences in attitudes towards education and work. Girls’ fiction in these white settler colonies has many similarities, containing strong ideals related to domesticity, education, employment, and femininity. In the Canadian fiction, attitudes towards women’s higher education and employement are generally much more positive. Although both Australian and Canadian girls’ fiction typically conclude with marriage, Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Nellie McClung’s Pearlie Watson are offered the opportunity to pursue higher education and use this education to teach others. In contrast, Lilian Turner’s Paradise and the Perrys, Ethel Turner’s Fair Ines, and Mary Grant Bruce’s ’Possum emphasise the importance of domesticity while also showing how girls sought to earn income without leaving home. Through our comparison of these Canadian and Australian novels, all published between 1908 and 1921, we demonstrate how the different feminine ideals embodied through these heroines are inevitably intertwined with the needs of the nation
History
Title of book
Colonial girlhood in literature, culture and history, 1840-1950Series
Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and cultureChapter number
13Pagination
180 - 194Publisher
Palgrave MacmillanPlace of publication
Basingstoke, EnglandPublisher DOI
ISBN-13
9781137356345ISBN-10
1137356340Language
engPublication classification
B1 Book chapterCopyright notice
2014, Palgrave MacmillanExtent
16Editor/Contributor(s)
K Moruzi, M SmithUsage metrics
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