摘要：Three decades ago, Susan Sheridan reviewed Exiles at Home, Drusilla Modjeska’s study of ‘Australian women writers, 1925-1945.’1 She wrote then that Modjeska’s work ‘breaks new ground in that it opens up perspectives on a whole period of history through the lives and work of a group of women writers … As the first ever booklength study of Australian women writers, Exiles at Home sets a high standard.’2 In 2011, Sheridan’s debt to this earlier research is evident: in the introduction to Nine Lives, she cites Exiles as ‘a key precedent for the present study’ (20). Her own work on her nine chosen authors is as illuminating, in terms of Australian feminist and cultural history, as Modjeska’s study of women novelists of the 1920s and 30s. Susan Sheridan covers the writing of poetry as well as fiction in her analysis, providing a wealth of insight into the work of five poets and four novelists. The poets are Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood, Rosemary Dobson, Dorothy Hewett and Dorothy Auchterlonie Green; the novelists Elizabeth Jolley, Thea Astley, Amy Witting and Jessica Anderson. Together these women make up the ‘nine lives’ of the book’s title: as many lives as the proverbial cat.
