Jennifer M.T. Carter reflects on some of the names, pseudonyms and deceptions she investigated in the Library’s Collection An author of eminence who closely guards a pseudonym becomes fair game for the bibliographer as well as for those who have a popular sense of literary curiosity,’ wrote E. Morris Miller. So, with the help of Professor Miller’s Australian Literature from Its Beginnings to 1935 and other bibliographical and biographical resources available to National Library readers, I began. During this pursuit of women who, for whatever reason, chose to write and work under a name other than their own, I also encountered others who were more—and sometimes less—than what they seemed.
The anonymity afforded by a pseudonym can be a distinct advantage: writing discreetly as ‘A Lady’, Jane Austen was able to draw upon the eccentricities of her neighbours. Australia’s colonial women had even more reason for discretion—after all, in times of crisis, they could be dependent upon those very neighbours for survival. Those with social pretensions or a respect for a husband’s sensibilities might not wish to be seen writing for financial gain. On the other hand, using a husband’s name indicated his approval—unless, as in the case of Mrs Aeneas Gunn, the lady was regrettably a widow. (The enduring success of We of the Never-Never doubtless consoled her for her loss.) The self-styled ‘Laurence Hope’ sought unsuccessfully to protect her husband’s privacy (see National Library of Australia News, November 2001), whereas the South Australian novelist Catherine Martin (1847–1937) took measures to protect her own. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature contains few biographical details of this ‘extremely reticent’ woman. The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) does rather better and paints a picture of a possibly embittered woman who failed to make a career for herself in a world of men (at one time she was a journalist, and then a public servant). Martin’s four novels include An Australian Girl (1890) and The Silent Sea (1892); two appeared anonymously, a third was by ‘Mrs Alick Macleod’, and the last novel she published in 1923 as C.E.M. Martin.
To some extent Catherine Martin anticipated ‘Henry Handel Richardson’, the writer referred to in the opening quote above as being ‘fair game’. Among the Library’s books devoted to the woman born Ethel Robertson in Melbourne in 1870, are volumes 1 and 2 of her letters. Reviled at school as ‘an odious toad and a great liar’ (as Axel Clark wrote in a year 2000 issue of the The Australian’s Review of Books), Richardson ‘remade or simply reinvented herself in her letters as she did in her fiction’. The ADB also remarks that Richardson’s accounts are not ‘reliable’ and it is with the pseudonymous ‘H.H.R’ that we see another phenomenon occurring—the creation for oneself of an alternative persona. The essence of a successful hoax is to build up a picture that cannot be challenged. Given the state of nineteenth-century communications, colonial women easily could—and did—draw upon a distant country for their deceit. Chance, or dedicated sleuthing, has exposed that masquerade later. Mrs Daisy Bates (1863–1951), the anthropologist and Protector of Aborigines, ensured she was never taken for anything other than a lady, claiming among other things an aristocratic pedigree dating back to the reign of Edward III. All this was accepted in ‘Kabbarli’s’ lifetime. Isobel White, however, refuted these claims in The Native Tribes of Western Australia (published by the National Library in 1985), and linked the former Daisy May Dwyer to Edwin Henry Murrant, who later changed his name to Harry Morant (immortalised as ‘The Breaker’, he was executed by the British in the Boer War).
Barbara Jane Baynton (1857–1929), whose papers, like those of Bates, are held in the National Library’s Manuscript Collection, also claimed to be other than she was. Professor Miller swallowed the package whole for his bibliography, and for the truth about this very astute woman, who wrote two successful books and apparently played the Australian stock exchange to perfection, I turned to the ADB. Baynton claimed to be the daughter of Penelope Ewart and Robert Lawrence Kilpatrick, a captain in the Bengal Light Cavalry. Her parents had eloped. Such a fiction was unlikely to be checked, and gave its author entrée to polite circles as a governess. Neither her employers nor their son, whom she married in 1880, knew that her parents were Irish ‘bounty immigrants’ and her father, John Lawrence, was a carpenter by trade. Not that her humble origins mattered—seven years and three children later, Alexander Frater deserted his wife and ran off with their maid. The rest of her story reads more like fiction. Cool-headed Barbara divorced her husband in 1890 and next day married the widowed Dr Thomas Baynton (he was 70, she was 33). She published Bush Studies in 1902, and when Baynton died in 1904, inherited the fine sum of £3871. This she invested on the stock exchange. She also dealt in antiques, and collected black opals from Lightning Ridge. Even so, she found time to travel and write her only novel, Human Toll (1907). In 1921 she married the fifth Baron Headley, ‘president of the Society of Engineers and of the Muslim Society in England’. Although a sportsman, and by now a bankrupt, the baron was not game enough to accept the throne of Albania, ‘carved out of the wreck of the Ottoman Empire’ in 1913 and increasingly troubled since then. ‘Outraged’, Barbara returned to Australia alone, consoling herself for the loss of a throne by building a palatial home in Melbourne’s Toorak. When she died in 1929, her estate was valued at £160 621.
Never has a name so defined an era as that of ‘Lola Montez’, whose connections with India were a little closer than those claimed by Mrs Baynton, and who will always be linked to the goldrush days in Australia. The Oxford Companion of Australian Literature entry for MONTEZ, LOLA (MARIA DOLORES ELIZA ROSANNA GILBERT) (1818–61), and that of the ADB, generously detail a life beginning in pathos and ending in penitence, with numerous sexual adventures in between. Lola eloped with Lieutenant Thomas James in Ireland in 1837, was deserted by him in Simla two years later, then trained as a dancer in Spain, assuming the name by which history remembers her. After a series of more or less stellar liaisons in Europe, including one with the aging King of Bavaria, Lola made for California where she became embroiled in controversies of a public and personal nature. Temporarily chastened (but most certainly not chaste), Lola reached the Victoria diggings, and soon recovered her vim and vigour. Far less successful in her professional life than Barbara Baynton, her private life was unarguably higher in drama. The National Library’s various collections reflect the glamorous and dramatic image we keep of this half-Irish and half-Spanish ‘courtesan’ of possibly noble descent. There is a rollicking polka, for example, published in 1858, and three portraits taken of ‘Madame Montez’ between 1855 and 1858. The book titles say in a few words what their contents say in thousands, with a catalogue listing that includes The Magnificent Montez: From Courtesan to Convert (published in 1930); Queen of Hearts: The Passionate Pilgrimage of Lola Montez (1936); The Infinite Woman (1951); Lola Montes [sic]: The Tragic Story of a Liberated Woman (‘Anon’, 1973) and so on—summing up a woman whose public persona was dangerously exciting and who, like and yet unlike Barbara Baynton, almost won a crown. Death quite literally brought her down to earth, and she is buried as Mrs Eliza Gilbert, in Brooklyn, New York.
The supreme accolade for outright cheek in pseudonyms and deception must surely go to Ann Harriett Edwards (1831–1914). Not only did she reinvent herself; she defined a whole nation for several generations to come. Ann Edwards, or as the world came to know her, Anna Harriette Leonowens, is immortalised in the musical The King and I. According to The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, she was born in Ahmednagar, India, the younger daughter of a British Army sergeant who died three months before her birth. Brought up by grandparents in England, she returned to India in 1849 and married Thomas Leon Owens, a clerk. When Owens died in Penang in 1859, she first ran a school, then for six years was governess to the 82 children of King Mongkut of Siam—a monarch she termed ‘morally mad’. The Library is a rich source of information—and misinformation—about Mrs Leonowens and her world. Her memoir, The English Governess at the Siamese Court: Recollections of Six Years in the Royal Palace at Bangkok, was published in 1870 in the United States of America, Anna’s new home, and with its tales of dungeons and human sacrifice proved a bestseller. The Romance of the Harem was an equal sensation in 1873. The personal life she created for herself was as colourful. Like Mrs Bates, she came of ancient lineage—not Irish, however, but Welsh. Poor Thomas Owens, so humble in life, was glorified by the manner of his dying: killed in a tiger hunt, no less. Seen as an authority on matters Siamese by none other than the prestigious Chambers Encyclopaedia of 1923, it was years before ‘the governess at the Court of Siam’ was finally debunked. (Compare Margaret Landon’s 1944 biography with Alexander Griswold’s 1961 King Mongkut of Siam; the former also in a Thai translation.) The Music Collection holds scores from The King and I with its famous song ‘Getting to Know You’. An interesting adjunct to these scores is a jazz recording by the present monarch of what is now Thailand. Researchers may not always like what they find out about the subjects of their interest, but thanks to the National Library’s resources they are unlikely to come away empty-handed. JENNIFER M.T. CARTER, a Fellow of the University of Melbourne, writes historical fiction under the pseudonym ‘Mary Talbot Cross’. |
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