Youth to age: family and education in the development of Judith Wright

© 2012 Dr. Georgina Claire ArnottThis thesis is a biographical study of Judith Wright’s first twenty-one years, which argues that by examining this period we are better able to understand her unconventional life-course and intellectual development. It shifts the emphasis from current, dominant readings of Wright, which contend that she was born different, inspired, unique, that like the archetypal Romantic poet she lived more or less outside of history. It seeks a new perspective on Wright by positioning her within the cultural, historical and intellectual environments in which she grew up. While the story of Wright’s life after the publication of her first poetry collection, The Moving Image (1946) is well known, not so well understood is the interesting path that led towards it. This thesis argues that it is through this prism that the mature Wright can best be seen. In order to understand the intellectual formation of Wright this thesis focuses on two areas: her family background and her time at the University of Sydney between 1934 and 1936. The first three chapters consider the example provided by three familial generations. Although most accounts have viewed Wright as emerging despite, not from, this apparently conservative, pastoral background, this thesis highlights the enduring influence of her family. The emphasis in this thesis on Wright’s time at university is, in part, a response to it remaining almost completely unexamined in current biographical studies. Writers have moved quickly from her childhood years to her late twenties, when she met Jack McKinney. An over reliance on this trajectory across the literature gives the impression that Wright was self-realised from a young age. As this thesis suggests, this was not so; in fact, the experience of going to university changed Wright socially, culturally and intellectually. Though there is evidence that Wright was unconventional in some senses before Sydney, in that city she adopted the increasingly fashionable sensibilities of a modern woman and embarked on her mature career in poetry. This thesis uncovers a variety of original documentation relating to Wright’s life, including her student journalism and, it is argued, her first adult poems. The final chapter of the thesis contends that this poetry formed the basis, intellectually and stylistically, of The Moving Image, a collection which was groundbreaking for both the poet and her society. Above all, this thesis seeks to re-cast our understanding of Wright by taking proper account of the familial, social and intellectual contexts through which she developed, and of the impact of these on the public figure she was to become