It also adds valuable information about the British and American publishing contexts for Dark’s work. Prelude to Christopher (1934) was chosen as Book of the Month by the London Evening Standard in 1936, while The Timeless Land was a Book of the Month Club selection in the United States in 1941. Dark was in constant dialogue with her British and American publishers.

Eleanor Dark has clearly been a labour of love for Wyndham, the book’s genesis dating back twenty years to a master’s thesis. At some point, though, the author seems to have fallen somewhat out of love with her subject. Despite enthusiastic criticism of certain of the novels and some poignant, sympathetic writing about Dark’s (long) final years, Wyndham often sounds as if she’s scolding or mocking her subject. What she can’t forgive, it seems, is the ‘privilege’ of Dark’s adult life, protected by Eric Dark’s income as a doctor, by the style of living he or they created for Eleanor’s writing life, and by the isolation from her society and its ordinary people that was encouraged, not only by this domestic environment, but also by Eleanor’s own invincible sense of the artist and by the mutual support network of the ‘little company’ of like-minded writers that sustained her in the interwar and wartime years.

This is the theme announced in the book’s title – ‘a world-proof life’. The phrase is Dark’s own, summing up for Wyndham both the enabling and disabling sides of Dark’s writing personality. Her sense of the artist as necessarily solitary, independent, obeying only the imperatives of her art, which her material circumstances enabled her to sustain, came at the cost, Wyndham argues, of her separation from the society she sought to understand in her fiction and the very ‘people’ she sought to address. Interestingly, in the original source from The Little Company (1945), the idea of a ‘world-proof life’ is challenged by the novel’s central character. ‘No life is world-proof now,’ he exclaims.

Wyndham tends to see Dark’s middle novels (Waterway, 1938, and The Little Company) as ‘dismal’ failures, flawed by the contradictions they embody between the absolute imperatives of art and the artist and the social and political imperatives, on the novel above all, that the crisis-filled years of the 1930s and early 1940s seemed to demand. Another view would be that this is the very dynamic that makes these novels such sensitive registers of their moment, and significant still.

There are key questions for analysis here. Dark, like other left-liberal literary intellectuals could invoke the nation and its people as her subject while remaining thoroughly ill at ease with the ‘masses’ or with the realities of everyday suburban life. Their anti-capitalism was always ready to turn into moral distaste rather than political engagement. Their belief in the writer’s mission or responsibility was prone to theatrical self-importance.

And yet, though I have written in various places about just these contradictions, I found myself defending Dark and her fellow writers from the tone, at least, of Wyndham’s criticisms; defending the seriousness of their commitments, the intelligence of their ethical rendering of social crises, the integrity of their attempts at writing or inability to write in the face of these crises.

I think Wyndham would also want to acknowledge these dimensions, but the stronger impression is of her impatience with her subjects’ posturing as she chastises them for their ‘conceit’, ‘self-deception’ or ‘irrelevance’. In the process, the horizon of a new intellectual or cultural history recedes. There is a recurrent problem of tone or phrasing that undoes its arguments – they ‘resented newcomers as the dying resent vultures’; their criticisms were ‘the rages of the impotent or near-impotent’; ‘the artist refused to relinquish her throne and its privileges’. In Dark’s case, the theme of the world-proof life increasingly blocks other kinds of explanation: ‘Ultimately, nothing could or did compensate for the increasingly distorted perspective of [sic] her society that her “world-proof life” offered.’

Part of the difficulty is that the criteria for judging the writers are not apparent. Dark is criticised for not writing the kind of novels that the Australian public needed or wanted during the years of crisis. Sometimes it sounds as if she should have been writing popular adventure stories in the mode of Ion Idriess or middlebrow romances (the very thing Dark knew she could do), at other times novels of grim realism and the class struggle.

Related is Wyndham’s confusion about Dark’s attempt at a ‘people’s literature’ and her (Wyndham’s) misuse of the term ‘social realism’. The source of the first reference is one unpublished manuscript from 1944. What Dark or her contemporaries might have understood by it is not discussed in detail. Yet the term is used to illustrate Dark’s failure to achieve or understand her own ambitions. While the middle novels are read oddly as failed attempts at ‘social realism’, again there is little discussion of what the concept (one Dark never used?) might have meant to her. This slides into ‘Moscow-ordained social realism’, tangling Dark’s ambition to write about social or political issues with a misunderstood ‘socialist realism’. To add to the puzzle, Wyndham adds that Dark ‘never claimed to write in the tradition and no claims have been made on her behalf’. Our trust in our guide is not helped by references to A.A. Zhdanov as a woman.

Wyndham writes well about the books she admires: Prelude to Christopher, The Timeless Land, and, with some qualifications, Lantana Lane (1959). But when she is out of sympathy, her criticism takes no prisoners. The Little Company ‘fails as entertainment, chronicle, thought, and art. Its narrative is weak; its characterisation poor; its characters unappealing.’ The author and I were always going to have problems getting on. For me, The Little Company is Dark’s great achievement, the novel in which she turns to best account her moral reading of social crisis and fuses technique and content into a complex calibration of different intellectual and authorial options, precisely because of its ‘narrow’, or better its ‘intense’, focus on the little company of writers.

Wyndham’s study does offer new perspectives on Dark’s fiction and her writing career, but it falls short of the cultural history to which it aspires and the intellectual history which it might have been. It needed a tough, sympathetic editor to work through some of those questions of tone, phrasing and emphasis. I’m afraid to say it needed a proofreader too.

Reviewers commenting on typographical errors as symptomatic of a more general decline in standards are exceedingly tedious. But this book indicates some of the problems in e-publishing that the newer publishing operations need to work through. E-publishing is undoubtedly a large part of the future for Australian scholarly publishing, out of necessity, yes, but also positively, because of the new opportunities it enables. Yet the value-adding role of editing, both on the large and small scale, remains essential. In addition to being so tightly bound that the biceps get a work-out just keeping it open, ‘A World Proof Life’ has a number of embarrassing errors – the reference to ‘Leonard +’; the endnote that reads, ‘This can’t be right. Check this and surrounding references’. I’m sure this wasn’t intended as a new form of interactive text. There’s even a ‘Carter op. cit.’ but no opus cited. Scholarly publishing deserves better, and so does this book.