Review of Nettie Palmer: Her Private Journal "Fourteen Years", Poems, Reviews and Literary Essays, edited by Vivian Smith

Abstract

The edition of Nettie Palmer's writings edited by Vivian Smith has so far attracted precious little critical attention. This is astonishing to me. In a decade when women's texts and women's achievements are at last being placed in the foreground of the critical picture, Nettie Palmer should surely be given particular attention. A writer with a clear, acute and independent mind, she has never had anything so much as her due. In their lifetimes, she was usually occluded by her husband, Vance Palmer, a man of great social charm and temporal acumen. It is certainly my memory of literary life in the 1950s that Vance was valorized as a cultural pioneer, a writer of fiction and a figure who could converse both with Marxists and with social democrats; Nettie, as I saw it then, was expected to play second fiddle to her husband.