Expatriate women writers Henry Handel Richardson and Christina Stead produced field-defining novels of transnational scale and aesthetic ambition that engaged both the matter of Australia and the locations from which they produced and circulated their writing. For Richardson, the provocations of the ‘modern breakthrough’ in Scandinavian literature were central to her work with the realist novel. Stead’s girlhood saturation in gothic fairy-tales, the French novel and the Australian tradition expanded into restless experiments with the novel in the avant-garde circles of Paris (1929–34), before her negotiation of literary debates in France, England and America. The narrative strand of Kunstlerroman in Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917–29) and Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children (1940) introduces the developing provincial subject as crucial to the vision of familial and national development, principally in the relation between child and parents. Stead and Richardson produced groundbreaking versions of the Kunstlerroman narrative, disrupting a stable nineteenth-century structure centred on stories about young artistic men. These women writers produced narratives of talented colonial subjects – young colonial children and provincial teenage daughters – situated outside these structures of power, and foregrounded their disruptive perceptions of flawed patriarchal-imperial modes of authority.

In this chapter, female homosocial relationships are explored as confident articulations of female identity and as suggestive models of political governance. Despite widespread anxiety about female-only assembly and scepticism regarding the virtues of female friendship, women writers in this period evidently found friendship between women to be a theme in which they could articulate and explore a range of feelings and emotions not otherwise sanctioned by their culture. The chapter considers a range of poetry and fiction – by Charlotte McCarthy, Margaret Goddard, Olivia Elder, Frances Sheridan, and her daughter Elizabeth – in relation to differentially situated ideas of ‘sisterhood’ before turning to the ways in which Ireland came to be figured as a ‘sister’ kingdom to Britain in the later century, thus shaping the proto-feminism of earlier traditions in new, national formations.