This is, of course, a worthy and important project, a rewriting and reconsideration of the past and of women’s creative and intellectual lives and the circumstances that have constrained them; it also taps in to a wider cultural conversation – championed by organisations like VIDA and the Stella Prize (indeed, one of Kelada’s fictional women writers is named Stella) – around redressing the historic bias against women writers and their work. Kelada’s novel imagines the lives of five different women, living and writing in 1901, 1929, 1932, 1954, and 1979 respectively, and explores the pressures and expectations that affected their work and its reception – be they family expectations and social mores, house- and caring work, or objectification and institutional sexism. But it’s also an ambitious project that doesn’t always accomplish its aims.

The five historical women in the novel are all characters who have been touched in some way by Sybylla. The first, Lucy, professes to ‘a hissing in [her] head’ that impels her to write; another is told that she was ‘born to bleed in ink’. Writing is their unavoidable fate; so too is being dismissed as frivolous at best, misguided and dangerous at worst. Each character narrates her story in the first person. At times their narration, and consciousness, seem ahistorical; each character is so keenly aware of the forces working against them and of the injustice of their situation, and able to describe these things clearly, and more completely than seems plausible for someone still embedded within them. The details of this oppression – characters who dismiss their work as ‘just silly things’ or ‘scribbles’, who remind them of their other duties or accuse them of having ‘grand notions’– are so similar across the stories that they eventually begin to feel unindividuated and almost didactic.

Furthermore, when these women do sit down to write – secretly at night, in the early morning before the family is awake – the words are always described as pouring from them effortlessly, or as it narrated to them wholesale by the characters of their own fiction. Kelada does not portray these womens’ writing as acts of volition, or work – they often seem more like vessels for the divine inspiration of the muse-like Sybylla – and while it is a political act to explore precisely what a woman’s muse might be, it nonetheless undermines the novel’s interest in tracing the determination, creativity, and intelligence of these women writers suppressed by the social forces of their time.

Odette KeladaDespite this, the narration in each of these stories is peppered with delightful turns of phrase and small jokes: Lucy wonders about her mother’s repeated mantra that she has ‘her hands full as it is’ by stating, ‘We run around with our hands full so the devil won’t come out and grab them’; Eve, worrying over the transgressive story she is writing, says, ‘I decide not to think. I am thinking too much. I will make jam instead’ (and discovers instructions for ‘How to preserve a husband’ in her recipe book to boot). These moments of levity are one of the real pleasures of the book; so too is the wildness of its premise and imagination. Each writer’s story is interspersed with a short and often dream-like return to the underlying narrative, of Sybylla and her companion trying to free themselves from behind the wallpaper pattern, where they are encountering these women. These passages serve as constant reminders of exactly what it is that the book is trying to do.

The stories are also impeccably researched. Kelada is an academic specialising in marginalised voices; her PhD focused on the lives of Australian women writers such as those that make up this book. There is a force and vitality to the angrier of her characters – Susanne in 1979, Vera in 1929 – that energises their chapters in particular. But this research is not always carried lightly, and at times seems to direct both the narrative and narration; so too does Sybylla’s insistence on the ‘real power of stories’ and their ‘danger’ occasionally feel forced. Drawing Sybylla is an admirably ambitious book, both in its form and scope, and it has much charm and intelligence, but it is uneven, and occasionally lacks the nuance that would make it a truly compelling read.