This week Bill is hosting Australian Women Writers Week for Generation Four (loosely, writers who began to publish in the ‘60s, ‘70s’ and ‘80s, but do follow the link for more details and the thoughtful commentary on characteristics of that time period’s innovations) and because he loves details that create a sense of place, I’m beginning by describing the neighbourhood in which I had my first apartment, amidst rows of older brick homes many of which had been turned into rental properties, downtown in a Southern Ontario city of (at that time) 300,000ish people.
Even in this city known for insurance and business—not the arts—my small apartment was a five-minute walk from three independent bookshops: one for booklovers, one for litlovers, and one for feminists. There was overlap between these three bookshops: you could buy Kate Chopin’s The Awakening in all of them. But stock diverged, too: in the first, I could buy Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars pocketbooks; in the second, I could buy a lovely reissue of The Hobbit; and in the third, I discovered Dale Spender’s books.
Bill would want me to state her spec’s clearly, I’m sure. (It’s probably a little late to please him: I’m walking a fine line.) Dale Spender was born September 22nd, 1943 in Newcastle, New South Wales although she would later be associated with Brisbane. (I wish I had a photograph here: Bill would.) Her aunt was Jean Spender, who wrote Australian mysteries (some of them were racy, according to Wikipedia!) and her uncle was a politician, Percy Spender.
Now that you have that handy link, you can check her out in detail. I’ll just add that one thing I knew was she had a younger sister Lynne, because several years later I would discover a second-hand copy of the letters they exchanged in the 1980s. And one thing I didn’t know (from a long list of not-knowing) is that she was a founder of Pandora Press, with its recognizable black-and-white covers and spines (think: Virago from Oceania).
Back to those bookshops: they were all open late on Friday evenings. My paycheques were issued on alternate Thursdays and, in those weeks of false but glorious abundance, stealing from funds that rightly belonged with foodstuffs or other essentials, I would go bookshopping on Friday evenings. Sometimes I would spend all my time (and money) in one of them. Sometimes I would tour all three and then make a tortured selection. This says a lot about me, I realize, that that comprised my Friday nights, but we’re all friends here.
The first of Dale Spender’s books that I bought was Mothers of the Novel (1986) which presents “100 good women writers before Jane Austen.” That was one of my earliest (and most ambitious, at that point) reading projects. It was closely followed by Women of Ideas (1982) whose girth was intimidating; I had it on the shelf for a few years before I dared to begin but then it read even more quickly than the literature volume. What struck me in that volume was the presence of scientists and mathematicians; learning about those women was a game-changer for me.
These two books made me such a fan of Dale Spender that I bought every book of hers I could find in that shop. And believe me, some of them nearly bored me to tears. Conceptually, they were interesting (her focus on bias in favour of male students, in classroom settings, for instance) but the studies were a little outdated (because not many were conducted on this topic) and they were carried out in places and institutions that I’d never heard of. Still, out of loyalty I read these books too and shelved them on what was then a barely existent non-fiction shelf. The idea of their keeping my favourite Spenders company: that was enough.
Her books about early feminist writers in the colonies were wholly interesting to me though; these I borrowed from an academic library, and I made ridiculously detailed notes. (Like 1983’s Feminist Theorists, for instance.) When I found a second-hand copy of Scribbling Sisters, with those letters between Dale and Lynne, I loved it hard. Then, I searched everywhere to find a copy for my friend, Helen, whom I considered my scribbling sister (but we aren’t sisters!), and I’ve picked it up countless times to browse, over the years, whenever I’ve felt a little lonely or faraway from a friend.
But now when I think of Dale Spender, I think of an oversized volume that I picked up on a whim one afternoon. After a short shift at work, I got off the bus and walked the half block to the shop, before crossing the street to go home. It felt like a boon, because I was rarely book-shopping during the day. That’s when I found her guide to the internet. I see that she has a 1995 publication, Nattering on the Net, but I recall that being more of a theoretical volume. What was this book? No doubt it’s a collectible now, even if it was real.
So I have to wonder whether I’ve imagined it, or imprinted her name onto a volume by another familiar and well-loved woman writer. Nonetheless, this book introduced me to the internet in a format that I could understand. Which is to say, via the printed page. Yes, there were pages and pages of URLs: places to visit and explore, communities of bookish people who were as obsessed about reading as I am. Yes, it was incredibly awkward to type in those seemingly nonsensical internet addresses with all their colons and slashes and dashes.
In time, this landscape would change. The feminist bookshop moved further down the street—and then it closed. The litlovers shop closed too. The booklovers shop shrank and moved around the corner (where it is still functioning seemingly although I’ve not visited in a couple of years). And the digital landscape changed too.
What hasn’t changed at all, is how great a reading project Dale Spender’s The Mothers of the Novel would be. Just browsing through it, with Bill’s week in mind, I am all a-swell with reading lists and possibilities again. Over the years I have added little sheets of paper for particular authors I’ve enjoyed, and although I now feel as though most of the names are familiar, I would probably have a much easier time locating all those books now (via Project Gutenberg and similar ventures).
And even if it wasn’t Dale Spender who encouraged me to find other booklovers online, I can’t help but feel like she’s kinda introduced me to all of you, and I’m so heartfully glad to have met you here. Thanks for hosting, Bill.
A great post, both the Friday night meanderings and trying to make bookish decisions and your introduction to a writer who sounds like an interesting character with a curious mind.
The Australian participants situate Dale Spender more knowledgably than I–she really is a pivotal figure for the study of Australian women writers–but I do, as you say, connect with her curiosity for sure.
We Australians think that her importance in the study of pre-Jane Austen English writers should also be acknowledged.
LOL Bill, you’re so sassy. What’s Claire to think, and she’s new here. 🙂
Dale Spender isn’t a writer whose work I have come across, but the two reference works on women writers and thinkers sound quite interesting. Haven’t we all had times in our lives when book purchases came before all else even if it meant going without! Thank goodness for libraries!
I have a copy of Nattering on the Net! Well, my Librarything catalogue says I have and the cover looked really familiar, so it must be on the far end of the feminist bookshelf! I wonder what that will read like now! I think I must have read the pre-Jane Austen one at university, but I will also admit I get her mixed up with Mary Daly and always think she wrote Gyn/Ecology!
Really!? If you find it on your shelves, let me know if it has a bunch of HowTo stuff in it? How to find online communities on different subjects, etc.? I don’t think so: I think the book I’m remembering is something different. But I can’t find another appropriate listing under her name that aligns with my memory either. All those feminists getting muddled in your mind! You’ll have to read more of them to get them to sit in their assigned seats. Heh
Listen, if your Fridays don’t involve a book or bookshop somehow, you aren’t doing the weekend right 🙂
Then I was doin’ those weekends REALLY right. Heheh
Loved the imagery of you visiting three bookstores on a Friday night! (And enjoyed your answer to Bill about the library display.) Before I met my husband I used to go to a Borders on Friday nights regularly with a friend, and we’d just get coffee and look at magazines. I didn’t have much expendable income then either. But I have fond memories of that time!
TY. Do you make displays in your library? 🙂 I wish I’d had a reading friend at that time: that would have been much more fun. And that’s true, there were definitely a lot of times when I was imagining what I was going to buy another time. Like with an invisible book token to spend. LOL
I used to make displays often but now that usually falls to the assistant. But it’s fun!
At the bookstore, years ago, I helped with the windows a few times, and that was fun too.
Great post – just fascinating. I think I have Mothers of the Novel somewhere, but she was obviously more than a one-book woman!
That one alone, though, that would keep you busy for a long time. You’d love Women of Ideas though, if you ever see it second-hand (I’m sure it’s OP): super chatty and enthusiastic and inspiring!
Loved reading this of course Marcie. I’m embarrassed that you’ve read more Spender than I have, but I did of course fall in love with Pandora Press, as I did with Virago. I have Mothers of the Novel, and keep wanting my Jane Austen group to do some of those writers, but I haven’t managed to frame a plan yet.
I have an embarrassing admission to make which is that I often conflate Dale Spender with Debra Adelaide, which I think is not totally stupid as I seem to remember that Adelaide was a student of Spender’s? Yes, I’ve just found it. Lynne Spender was Debra’s high school English teacher, and introduced Debra to Dale who started her off researching Australian women writers.
Thanks, WG. You’ve probably read more from the press than I have though! There are ten big chapters/authors (only little references for the rest), so you could just do two each year (if everyone is interested in classics). Maybe you choose the author for a month rather than a specific, if that appeals, to allow everyone a bit of latitude, but there are probably key works from each available in paperback whereas most would be digital. Thanks for explaining that connection: I had no idea and it’s so interesting to know how influential women writers can be, on one another and beyond. I’ve never read Debra Adelaide but have often pawed at one of her books in the branch library (tho not since 2020 obviously).
[…] Bill would want me to state her spec’s clearly, I’m sure. (It’s probably a little late to please him: I’m walking a fine line.) Dale Spender was born September 22nd, 1943 in Newcastle, New South Wales although she would later be associated with Brisbane. (I wish I had a photograph here: Bill would.) Her aunt was Jean Spender, who wrote Australian mysteries (some of them were racy, according to Wikipedia!) and her uncle was a politician, Percy Spender. Read on … […]
What an interesting post, I must say I have never heard of Dale Spender at all. Perhaps not surprising for a UK reader, I expect she is well known in Australia. From the amount you have read, she seems to have been quite prolific.
She does have a lot of books to her name. I bet you do see the occasional Pandora Press second-hand wherever you are finding second-hand Virago books (they’re so similar in nature)…but it’s likely been as long since you’ve been shopping for books as it’s been since I last went myself.
What a wonderful raconteur you are!
Dale Spender was a Big Noise here in Australia, which meant I read a lot about her ideas in the press (which was all print in those days) but I was too frivolous to actually read any of her books. I was busy reading the (mostly Australian) women who burst onto the literary scene and wrote novels which I still love to this day. It was such an exciting time!
Thank you, and I can see where that might well have been my response, too, if I’d had access to those contemporary fiction writers alongside her. In my case, I was longing for more structured learning at the time, so her books fit the bill in many ways. LMK if, in your used bookstore travels, you ever see a book by her called Using the Internet: For Girls Who Read Too Much. LOL
A lovely post indeed, though I’m not sure I have any right to set rules for others. My introduction to Dale Spender was in the 1980s. I was a youngish husband with a wife and three kids and a house in the suburbs of Melbourne Australia (pop. then say 4 mil), self-employed as a software developer. Our local library set up a display of books by nineteenth and early twentieth century Australian women writers, many of whom had not only been out of print for the best part of a century, but who had also been hidden from view – their existence nowhere admitted – by the male focussed adulation of male bush realism of the 1890s which still dominates conservative views of Australianness to this day.
Those books – I devoured them all – were published by Dale Spender, at Pandora and at Penguin Australian Womens Library.
Twenty years later, doing a mature age M.Litt, I chose as the topic for my dissertation The Independent Woman in Australian Literature. My key text was Dales Spender’s Writing a New World: Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers (1988)
I have since written two or three reviews based on Mothers of the Novel, but as you say, it’s hard going, and I’m sorry to say, I’m yet to make it to the end. Lynn Spender has written similar works on her own and in conjunction with Dale. And Dale has (or had) a very purple website, but sadly she never answered any letter I sent her.
Any librarians reading here (I can think of one immediately!) who are responsible for display-work, online and IRL, will be tickled by knowing that the trajectory of your life was altered by a task on their to-do list in their day-to-day working life.
And I didn’t have so clear an understanding of how your dissertation fit into your life, or of how central her writing was to your research. But that all makes perfect sense!
For me, MotN and WoI were both accessible in style, but what slowed me with MotN was my own curiosity and ambition. She includes so much detail and I am invested in it all; I want to know, so I can READ ALL THE BOOKS. Not this year, but maybe next, I will reread more thoroughly, because I know many of these authors are more available than ever before: it would be a treat to explore properly at last.
I’m sad to think that she never replied to your letters. One of the things that I love knowing about specific children’s writers (Beverly Cleary and Laura Ingalls Wilder, come to mind) is when they refused to allow fan letters to go unanswered. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not sure if LIW’s dedication extended to adult readers who wrote to her…maybe she was only that attentive to children. It required many hours of work and she would make notes on the backs of the letters when she read them, then return to write many replies in a session.
I really enjoyed reading this! I’m pretty sure I read Man Made Language back in the late 80s/early 90s either for a women and literature course or as part of a research paper I wrote for a linguistics class. Your Mothers of the Novel book sounds well loved.
That’s one of hers that I recall being a tough read, but I’m sure that, in an academic setting, I would have taken it in stride. Likely I hadn’t quite recognised that feminist bookshops did carry a lot of theoretical and academic stuff (knowing that there weren’t many other bookstores who would shelve it). I use past tense, but maybe there are still some women’s bookstores around.
Lovely post! I’m sure those Friday night splurges were worth it even if they left you a little peckish.
Totally worth it: I wasn’t exactly making nutritional choices anyway. Heheh