Looking for home in all the wrong places : nineteenth-century Australian-Irish women writers and the problem of home-making

This thesis examines the writing of Irish identity in Australia to explore how nineteenth-century\ud Australian-born women writers negotiated their Irish emigrant heritage. A gap in knowledge\ud about Irish women's emigrant experiences and those of their descendants provides an opportunity\ud to investigate the translation of the Irish emigrant experience from the perspectives of first-born\ud Australian daughters. A critical analysis of the writing histories of Mary Eliza Fullerton, Mary\ud Grant Bruce and Marie Pitt (McKeown) will demonstrate the fragility of national identity in terms\ud of the cultural and symbolic language used to define Irish emigrant and Australian settler culture\ud identity between the late nineteenth-to-mid-twentieth centuries. The thesis provides an alternative\ud reading of national cultures and histories to show how each writer used images of Irish national\ud culture to clarify and elaborate notions of home in their Australian writing