Nettie Palmer

The edition of Nettie Palmer's writings edited by Vivian Smith has so far attracted precious little critical attention.

This is astonishing to me. In a decade when women's texts and women's achievements are at last being placed in the foreground of the critical picture, Nettie Palmer should surely be given particular attention.

A writer with a clear, acute and independent mind, she has never had anything so much as her due. In their lifetimes, she was usually occluded by her husband, Vance Palmer, a man of great social charm and temporal acumen.

 It is certainly my memory of literary life in the 1950s that Vance was valorized as a cultural pioneer, a writer of fiction and a figure who could converse both with Marxists and with social democrats; Nettie, as I saw it then, was expected to play second fiddle to her husband.