Catherine Helen Spence, an unparalleled advocate of women's rights in Australia and the world, is now recognized as an important predecessor to the Feminist movement. Her autobiography, composed while on her deathbed and enhanced with scholarly annotation from two Spence scholars, reveals a woman both in and ahead of her time.

Catherine Helen Spence was a charismatic public speaker in the late nineteenth century, a time when women were supposed to speak only at their own firesides. She was carving a new path into the world of public politics along which other women would follow, in the first Australian colony to win votes for women.

A transnational study of how settler colonialism remade the Victorian novel and political economy by challenging ideas of British identity.

"Percy Bysshe Shelley once described poets as the 'unacknowledged legislators of the world'. If this is true, Australian political scientists have shown curiously little interest in the role that literary figures play in the nation's political life. Novel Politics takes the relationship between literature and politics seriously, analysing the work of six writers, each the author of a classic text about Australian society. These authors bridge the history of local writing, from pre-Federation colonial Australia (Catherine Spence, Rosa Praed and Catherine Martin) to the contemporary moment (Tim Winton, Christos Tsiolkas and Kim Scott). Novel Politics unpicks the many political threads woven into these books, as they document the social world as it exists, while suggesting new possibilities for the nation's future. As political commentators of a particular kind, all six authors offer unique insights into the deeper roots of politics in Australia, beyond the theatre of parliament and out into the wider social world, as imagined by its dreamers and criticised by its most incisive discontents."--Back cover