John Shaw Neilson: A Life in Letters (Collected Correspondence)

Hewson, Helen

ISBN 10: 0522849202 / ISBN 13: 9780522849202

Published by Melbourne University Publishing, 2001

About this Item

Near fine, no issues. B&W photographs.

Seller Inventory # 002572

Bibliographic Details

• Title: John Shaw Neilson: A Life in Letters (Collected Correspondence)
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0522849202
• ISBN 13: 9780522849202
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

About this title

Synopsis

John Shaw Neilson (1872-1942) is one of Australia's finest and best-loved lyric poets. This comprehensive selection of letters to, from and about him fills a long-felt need, providing a vivid personal and social history.

The selection begins in 1906 when A. G. Stephens started up The Bookfellow. From this crucial point, and throughout the ensuing thirty-five years, we follow Neilson the man—farming and working in the bush, maintaining caring relationships with his scattered family, and finally moving in 1928 to Melbourne and a job as an interdepartmental messenger with the Country Roads Board in Carlton.

Helen Hewson has chosen and edited her material from more than a thousand existing letters, most of which have not been published previously. They cover family, social and publishing correspondence, in addition to the detailed letters about writing poetry which passed between Neilson and his three very different editorial advisers, A. G. Stephens, Robert H. Croll and James Devaney, his first biographer.

Other writers of the period who corresponded with Neilson included Robert Bridges, Mary Gilmore, Christopher Brennan, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Hubert Church, Percival Serle and Frank Wilmot. The letters are full of revealing details about his association with many institutions and personalities-the Australian Literature Association, the Bread and Cheese Club, Coles Book Arcade, the Hill of Content, the Hawthorn Press, Blamire Young, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Mary Gilmore, Bernard O'Dowd, Frank Wilmot, Victor Kennedy and others.

John Shaw Neilson: A Life in Letters establishes a social background and a literary context which ends any suggestion that Neilson is merely a 'bush poet' or 'a simple singer'. This complex poet participated in an intricate network of literary relationships and literary production, and it is only through reading the letters that one realises the degree to which he reflected on his own and other people's poetry and writing.

About the Author

Helen Hewson is an honorary research associate of the department of English at the University of Sydney. She was awarded the Dame Leonie Kramer Prize for the best doctoral thesis in Australian poetry 1995 for her thesisShaw Neilson: Collected Letters, and in 1990 won the New South Wales Journalists' Prize forEssay in Australian Literature.