My title comes from the words of South Australian suffragist Catherine Helen Spence, who once described herself as a new woman, awakened to her sense of responsibility to both family and community, that ‘the world may be glad that she had been born.’ She also declared that the most interesting life for both men and women was one of ‘gratified activity,’ or, in other words, a rewarding sense of purpose.
Matthew and Elizabeth Goode came to South Australia in the mid-nineteenth century. Soon established among Adelaide’s wealthy, middle-class merchants, they were deeply involved in both the Congregational Church and the London Missionary Society. By 1880, they had eleven children – three sons and eight daughters – all with a strong sense of responsibility to both family and the Church, and a determination to lead fulfilling lives.
But it is the eight daughters on whom I am choosing to focus for my PhD, eight sisters to whom I introduced you over two years ago when I was writing my honors thesis on the penultimate sister, and my great grandmother, Christina Love Goode.
All the Goode sisters were born during Queen Victoria’s reign, in the infant colony of South Australia. As I have mentioned before, Edith and Clara went as missionaries to China with the London Missionary Society, and later, Clara was thought to have been killed during the Boxer Rebellion. She wasn’t. Christina was a doctor in England, Shanghai and Renmark. Lily, the artist, travelled the world with her paint box and easel. Edith and Clara, Mabel and Annie ended up migrating to Canada. Two married in Peking, two in Manitoba, one in Tokyo, one in London. One married an Adelaide boy and remained for most of her life in South Australia, and only one never married.
Relationships between siblings, particularly sisters, has long been popular in fiction. Many English-speaking readers will have fond memories of the five Bennet sisters in Pride & Prejudice, Louisa May Alcott’s four Little Women, and Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians. Yet historians have shown little interest in the effects of sisterhood, unless of the Feminist kind. Philippa Gregory wrote about the Boleyn sisters and Henry VII’s daughters, Margaret and Mary Tudor, but until recently she focussed primarily on royal women who make a big splash on the pages of history as wives, sisters and daughters of Kings.
In 1993, Drusilla Modjeska compiled an anthology about sisters, including writers such as Helen Garner and Elizabeth Jolley. Sisterhood, they suggest, is ‘a complex network of shifting alliances,’ something I plan to explore further in my thesis. Shifting alliances aside, in an era long before telephones or the internet, these sisters would maintain a close rapport, despite the tyranny of distance – and ages – between them. Jane Austen certainly saw nothing unusual in that when she wrote in Mansfield Park:
Children with the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply.
Modjeska writes that she finds such proximity to one’s sisters a little hard to fathom.
Historians and psychologists (think Freud!) have certainly preferred to dwell on more fathomable parental bonds. Matthew and Elizabeth may have had a strong moral influence over their large brood, but the Goode sisters’ letters illustrate that their sororal relationships also played a significant role in their lives. Raised in the family home on Wakefield Street in the city of Adelaide, the sisters appear to have been a strong unit from the beginning, and remained close all their lives, providing emotional support and exerting considerable influence on one another, whether they were living in Adelaide or Melbourne, London, Peking, or Portage-la-Prairie.
In the Victorian era, children from middle class and aristocratic households were generally raised by nursery maids and nannies. Parents remained emotionally distanced from their offspring, often sending them to boarding school as soon as they left the nursery. Whether or not the Goodes had household staff, it is apparent from their correspondence that the older sisters helped to raise and teach the younger. It therefore seems reasonable to assume that the older siblings played a crucial part in their development of the younger ones.
Katie Barclay wrote that ‘family histories… are not only about the family but about the family’s role in the events of the nation.’ She also says that to understand our ancestors, it is necessary, ‘to interpret them through a wider historical context, through the motivations and emotions of [wo]men like them.’
These two points are both relevant to my research on the Goode sisters, where I will be looking at their contribution to the early years of settler-colonialism in South Australia and the impact of the colony’s unusual take on female education, family, and religion.
In Britain, a middle-class woman in the Victorian Era was generally defined by marriage and motherhood, financially dependent on her spouse, the moral keeper of the keys, and this attitude followed the colonists to Australia, as we can see in a quote I found in The Advertiser from 1896. At a meeting of the YWCA, a Church of England minister, the Rev. F. Webb stated that ‘he liked to see women the figureheads of home life, and he did not care about them taking too prominent a position in public matters.’
However, due to the strong influence of many liberal thinking, non-conformist citizens here in South Australia, the attitude was changing more rapidly than the Right Rev. Webb cared to admit. Already women had the right to vote, to stand for parliament and to attend the University of Adelaide, which began admitting women to degree courses in 1881. The first Australian university to do so, I might add! By the end of the century, a few privileged women had taken the opportunity to reinvent themselves as educated, financially independent, mobile young women. This would include the daughters of Matthew and Elizabeth Goode…
…which brings me to the matter of biography. Once the domain of the grand narrative, interested only in heroic male leaders or significant male politicians, biography has, in recent times, become more interested in the lives of ‘mere mortals’; to examine, as Barbara Caine explains, how ‘an individual life can reflect wider patterns within society or show the impact of social, economic and political change on ordinary people;’ a perspective that has swung even Philippa Gregory away from her passionate interest in Tudor and Plantagenet queens.
Since I began research for this thesis, I have explored biography’s many sub-categories from microhistory to memoir, ego-histoire to life-writing. But the most significant to this project, are speculative and collective biography.
‘Speculative Biographers,’ says Donna Lee Brien, ‘diligently work from the available evidence, but …make what might be termed educated guesses to fill biographical gaps,’ adding that any conjecture must be evidence based and clearly signalled. Collective biography, according to Barbara Caine is a biographical study with more than one subject, often dealing with professional or social groups, or, as in this case, siblings. The business of such biographies, Caine says, is to portray the nature of the connection by focussing on the shared relationships and experiences, rather than the individual.
So here I sit, aiming to write a collective, speculative biography about eight first generation, settler-colonial sisters from South Australia; to recover their untold narratives through letters and diaries; and to explore the creation of their new identities away from their Adelaide origins; to speculate on the inspirations and motivations that led many of them to choose paths diverging from Victorian expectations of middle-class women. I also hope to uncover the ‘complex network of shifting alliances’ between these eight women and to assess their contributions to the history of South Australia.
By examining their lives through the combined lenses of settler-colonialism, Imperialism, and First Wave Feminism, I will analyse the intersecting contexts of class, race, religion, education and family that informed the life choices of the Goode women; to consider the broader structural changes to society during this period that provided them with increased opportunities to work and travel, and to acknowledge the privileges of race and wealth that allowed them uncommon freedom to follow their dreams.
My research has led me to the archives of the State Library and the Special Collections of the Barr-Smith and Flinders University Libraries. Earlier this year, I travelled to Canada and the UK to meet other Goode descendants, who proved wonderful sources of information, sharing boxes of unpublished family histories, photographs, letters, notebooks and diaries, family memorabilia, artefacts and ephemera that have added enormously to my understanding of the family history.
In Canada, a local library in Manitoba helped me unearth details about the sisters who settled there after 1903. In the UK, The Bristol City Library and the Bristol City Archives also helped solve several small mysteries about Christina’s working life in England. And the archives at the School of Oriental & African Studies at the University of London provided a wealth of information about the London Missionary Society, including numerous reports written to the Secretary of the LMS by Clara and Edith Goode, and Edith’s husband, John Allardyce.
As historians tell us, letter writing became a crucial tool for women once it became possible to get an education like their brothers. It not only gave them the opportunity ‘to reach out for the advice, support and sympathy’ of their absent mothers and sisters, it also gave them a voice, a chance to develop a sense of self, to express themselves beyond the limits of the drawing room and to create new identities for themselves.
Also, importantly, those letters provide us, the modern reader, with a window into the past.
And it isn’t just letters that provide a link to our ancestors, but also inherited objects. In researching the Goode family, I have uncovered, among other things, several of Lily’s paintings and a wooden spinning chair she carved at the Adelaide Art School; Chinese porcelain and Chinese robes that Edith brought from Peking; a cedarwood chest that Christina brought back from Asia; a Russian silver samovar; and a family Bible.
I have explored the nineteenth century genre of female missionary biographies, giving me a fascinating insight into the world Edith and Clara would have encountered in Peking. And I have attempted to decipher a multitude of letters the sisters wrote to each other.
For several of the Goode sisters, mission and medical work abroad, and philanthropy at home gave them a socially acceptable means of claiming a voice in the public sphere. Also, by drawing on family letters, diaries and documents, public archives and the theories of speculative biography, I hope to gain a better understanding of the sororal relationships that supported their endeavours. Together, these women provide a unique insight into the social and cultural changes that affected a South Australian settler-colonial family in the Victorian era, and a window onto the lives of eight sisters who remained closely knit their whole lives, despite spending many decades – and thousands of miles – apart.
Donna Lee Brien writes that ‘A common feature of many speculative biographies involves the biographer openly acknowledging their research and writing process’. In the role of biographer and descendant, I am considering how to acknowledge my presence in this process. Also, as no living relations really remembers any of these women, I must rely heavily on my primary sources, in which I will undoubtedly find many gaps. Do I have enough information to ensure informed speculation does not become historical fiction? How will I discover the intimate details? Did they laugh together? Were they competitive? Or protective? Were there natural pairings within the collective? Was there an innate leader? A Black Sheep? A Favourite? There is also the problem of my own 21st century perspective on 19th century lives. I can research the facts, but can I reproduce the thought processes of the time, hugely significant in uncovering the motivations and aspirations of these eight women?
Another more practical problem I have encountered is that their handwriting is often extremely hard to read, especially when the sisters attempted to save on postage and paper by writing crossways over what they had already written on very fine paper! While I am certain the story is in the details, it is proving quite a headache to decipher their writing and unravel those details.
Finally, will such a biography prove hard to define and delineate, as I try to disentangle so many interrelationships in this sprawling, female-centric family? I suspect the answer is ‘undoubtedly’, but then life is made up of the kind of dislocated minutiae that are found in archives. And perhaps it is those intimate details that engage our attention and affection more deeply than a sparse timeline and ‘chronicles of major political and military events’?
Virginia Woolf, writing at the end of an era when biographies were predominantly about renowned male leaders or high achievers (again, mostly male), wrote that ‘the question… inevitably asks itself, whether the lives of great men only should be recorded.’ Conversely, biographies about the lives of ordinary individuals at grassroots level have gained popularity in recent years. This narrative, however, will focus on a respectable, middle-class family who, as Penny Russell wrote, ‘seemed destined from the outset to historical invisibility’; a family who neither moved mountains, nor rocked boats. Yet this true story is as engaging as any 19th century Bildungsroman, as it traces the formative years and development of eight settler-colonial sisters ‘from childhood to full productive citizenship…[that] in many ways… [reflects] the sense of national development.’
I have, however, found limited references to collective biographies about such middle-of-the-road sisters– probably because such epithets don’t make them seem very interesting to study! This makes my project challenging, but also provides an opportunity to address a research gap in this area, and to demonstrate the value of combining history and speculative biography to record the lives and aspirations of a generation of settler-colonials that will make, to paraphrase historians Curthoys and McGrath, readable history.
These were eight unusual, but not exceptional women. They did not lead the march of feminism but were rather the foot soldiers behind the heroes. Nonetheless, by incremental steps, and by quietly retaining their image as responsible, respectable Victorian ladies, they helped to expand horizons and build foundations from which future women would benefit. Yet, despite their contributions, these women have been overlooked by writers of South Australian history, something I hope to rectify as I delve into their life stories.