Rosemary Lancaster, in her lively and highly readable study, discusses five women who lived parts of their lives in France. They are Daisy White, an Australian girl sent to school in France to acquire accomplishment and ‘finish’ at the end of the nineteenth century; the writer Jessie Couvreur (‘Tasma’), who made three trips as a young woman to the Paris of the Belle Epoque and later settled in Europe after her marriage to a Belgian citizen; painter and diarist Stella Bowen, who lived with her companion, Ford Madox Ford, in the expatriate world of the Left Bank in the 1920s; writer Christina Stead, who experienced the Paris of the Depression and the ascent of European fascism; and World War II hero Nancy Wake, who fought as a British agent with the French Resistance. The last four women, like the Australian nurses of World War I who comprise the sixth essay, have been the subject of extensive research and biographical writing over the last two decades. Lancaster adds little to our knowledge of the women and the novelty of her study lies in the focus on their French lives.

Lancaster’s choice of subjects is intended – as indeed it does – to present a sample from the wide range of the experience and responses of Australian women in France, and there is much diversity in her sample. Daisy White’s diary records the experiences, and often sharp observations, of a sixteen-year-old Australian girl sent with her younger sister away from home and family to finish her education. Inevitably, the diary is much preoccupied with the day-to-day events and rituals of boarding school life, but it also records Daisy’s educational visits to the monuments, galleries, theatres and shops of Paris, and her growing pleasure in looking at paintings. Daisy’s diary ends before her return to Australia, so that there is little opportunity to know, or speculate, about the impact of her experience in France on her ongoing, albeit short, life.

The details of daily school life predominate over France in Daisy White’s diary, and the letters of the World War I nurses on the Somme and the autobiography of Nancy Wake, The White Mouse (1985), record personal participation in war rather than its theatre. The great majority of the Digger nurses whose lives Lancaster discusses were attached to British units in France. The exception is Nellie Crommelin, who nursed with the Red Cross and was assigned to a French hospital. Unlike most of the other nurses, she was closely connected to the events that affected the French people. After the war, she remained in France to work with the victims of the Spanish influenza pandemic and the women and children wounded by live shells in their villages and farms. Nursing the French, Crommelin came to write at times of France as ‘her land’ and the French soldiers as ‘ours’. At the beginning of 1918 she commented on the dangers and hardships that she had shared with the French ‘have only helped to draw us together to strengthen the bond between the splendid ancient Nation and the new and equally promising country which I am proud to belong to’.

The most evocative writing on France in Lancaster’s sample is Stella Bowen’s recently rediscovered Drawn From Life (1940), now recognised as a classic in Australian autobiography. While Bowen’s joy in Paris and Provence is beautifully etched in the autobiography, her French life with the financially and emotionally untidy Ford was far from easy, and her last years in Paris were those of a deserted ‘wife’ and single mother whose financial security had disappeared first in Ford’s literary enterprises and then in the Depression.

There is similarity in the representations of life in Bowen’s Left Bank world of the Lost Generation and in Tasma’s two novels set in Belle Epoque Paris, The Penance of Portia James (1891) and Not Counting the Cost (1895), the focus of Lancaster’s chapter on Tasma. Bowen’s equation of Paris with freedom from the bourgeois constraints and expectations of Edwardian British societies at home and abroad, and with opportunities to lead richer and more independent lives, sat uneasily with her personal need for domestic and emotional order and the sense of responsibility that constrained her from adopting the sexual permissiveness of so many of her Left Bank associates. The heroines of Tasma’s novels are Australian girls negotiating the moral mazes of the Left Bank in the Belle Epoque, equated with temptation, freedom and decadence, in contrast with the duty and obligation of home. The encounter of the women with this foreign society is portrayed as perplexing and disruptive, and in the end Victorian scruples prevail over Continental enticement.

The essay on Christina Stead also concentrates on fiction. Despite the joy of being in Paris that is expressed in Stead’s early letters home, the Paris of the novels, The Beauties and Furies (1936) and House of All Nations (1938), is again a seamy city, one full of financial and other charlatans, visitors as well as locals. Lancaster argues that Stead looked to the literary legacy of Balzac and Maupassant, ‘each a merciless critic of the capital’s coveters of money, sex and power’, and that her experience of the Parisian world of her banker partner, William Blake, aroused her moral consciousness to levels of intensity she was never to forgo. Paris, in the novels, is observed with a mordantly critical eye. Lancaster’s background is in literary criticism, and, in her essays on both Stead and Tasma, her interest in analysing the novels overtakes her focus on France, so that her readings become multi-stranded.

Lancaster’s study is of Australian women in France. While different versions of France are depicted, from the Belle Epoque to the Resistance, the women, with the exception of Nellie Crommelin and Nancy Wake, lived much of their French lives in the France of expatriates and foreigners, regardless of the level of their engagement with French culture. This is a question which Lancaster has not really addressed. Her study might have profited, too, from a longer introduction, placing her women in the wider framework of the images and representations of France that have circulated in Australia and that the women took with them. Nevertheless, Je Suis Australienne is an evocative introduction to the overseas lives of Australian women in France.