Friends and Rivals returns to these familiar scenes by a different road. In grouping Turner with her fellow writers and near-contemporaries Barbara Baynton, Henry Handel Richardson, and Nettie Palmer, Niall normalises the notion of children’s literature and its authors as an integral part of literary history. While all four writers published work in several different literary forms and genres, Turner is best known for her children’s literature, Baynton for her short stories, Richardson for her novels, and Palmer for her literary criticism and journalism. Niall writes about all four categories as a continuum across a literary spectrum. Her chief interest is in the lives and times of these four women, and the ways in which those things are reflected in their work.

The main reason for choosing these four writers as a group study seems to be that each has held an idiosyncratic place in the history of Australian writing. Baynton was born in 1857, Palmer in 1885, with Turner and Richardson halfway between and exact contemporaries, both born in 1870. Of the Australian literary scene around the turn of the nineteenth century, Niall says that women ‘were not welcome among the “bards and bohemians” and because their material and outlook tended to be different from those of the men, they were often left on the margins of the story of Australian literature’. This observation from the introduction is echoed in the book’s final sentences: ‘… these women writers defied the categories of female achievement. Today we would call all four of them outliers.’

Niall gives each author her own chapter, but she also explores the interrelationships among them, their similarities, and in some cases their dramatic differences. In considering them as a group, this book recalls two earlier such feminist landmarks in Australian studies: Drusilla Modjeska’s Exiles at Home: Australian women writers 1925–1945 (1981), which considers the interrelated lives of Marjorie Barnard, Eleanor Dark, Jean Devanny, Miles Franklin, Nettie Palmer, Katharine Susannah Prichard, and Christina Stead within their historical context; and Carole Ferrier’s edited compilation As Good as a Yarn With You: Letters between Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark (1992), which covers the period 1930–57.

With the exception of Nettie Palmer, the youngest of Niall’s subjects by fifteen years, her ‘outliers’ and their best-known works belong to an earlier time. Turner’s classic Seven Little Australians was published in 1894, Baynton’s Bush Studies in 1902, and the third and final volume of Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony in 1929, while Palmer began ‘building her reputation as Australia’s steadiest and best-informed critic’ in the early 1920s. What Modjeska’s, Ferrier’s, and now Niall’s books have in common is their focus on the gender-specific experience of female authors in the first half of the twentieth century.

Both Turner and Richardson were married to men who were devoted to them. The psychologically robust Turner was willing and able to do her own negotiating with publishers and to manage her own income, while Richardson had the same kind of enviable marriage as George Eliot and Virginia Woolf: all three were emotionally labile women guarded and cherished by strong, sane husbands who loved them and believed in their genius. Palmer was her novelist husband Vance’s loyal and adoring champion, in ways that sometimes hindered her own writerly judgement and reputation. Baynton’s life was shaped by her three marriages, first to an unfaithful wastrel, then to a well-heeled older man who provided her with money, education, polish, and support, and finally to an eccentric peer who made her Lady Headley before the marriage’s rapid unravelling.

In each case, their experience of marriage bore directly on their subject matter, authorial practice, and success. Niall makes one observation about Baynton that rings true but runs counter to the notion that a coddled and cherished female author will benefit from those advantages: ‘Anger gave her stories their strange power, and when anger yielded to social ambition, she had no more to say.’

Niall explores all of these marriages with relish, and also hints at other intimate and often unrecorded matters of female experience. ‘It is possible that some anguished poems, written by Barbara about the loss of a child, capture the sadness of a miscarriage,’ she writes. She also speculates at some length about the peculiar and alarming evidence that Turner’s stepfather, only fourteen years her senior, entertained violently sexual feelings about her that he barely tried to hide, but that she, apparently, did not recognise for what they were.

So quiet and approachable does Niall seem through the medium of her straightforward prose style that the reader is almost relieved, and certainly amused, by the occasional silvery whip-flick of sardonic wit. In a description of Baynton, out on a shopping expedition described in Turner’s diary (for the two were unlikely friends and often went out together), Niall writes, ‘You can tell by the way she wears her jewels that she has more at home.’ Turner’s brother-in-law Fred Thompson is described as an ‘underperforming dentist’. And here is Richardson’s long-suffering mother, Mary, exiled in Europe as she tries to support the careers of her musical daughters: ‘After three years in Leipzig, speaking no German and enduring, in a two-bedroom flat, the sounds of Ettie’s piano, Lil’s violin and the cello played by their friend and lodger, Mattie Main, Mary needed to go home.’

Such light moments leaven this formidable combination of meticulous scholarship, reader-friendly lucidity, and ideas – built into the conception and structure of the book – about the nature of feminism, biography, and Australian literary and cultural history, and about the many places where those things intersect.