Dark, Eleanor, 1901-1985.

Prelude to Christopher / Eleanor Dark. (1934, London: Collins, 1936)

This was Eleanor Dark’s second novel and established her as a significant new voice, especially after the novel was awarded the Australian Literary Society’s medal for the best novel published in that year. Not everyone was enamoured of it, however. Marjorie Barnard wrote to Nettie Palmer of how she had:

…just read “Prelude to Christopher” and wiped my brow with the feeling of having had a miraculous escape from writing it. Pretty bad, don’t you think? A showing-off book, simply loaded with techniques — some positively inspired carpentry and joinery. Is it a youthful indiscretion? There are some good spots too.

Barnard may well have been reacting to Dark’s ambitious attempt to achieve a different form for her fiction, one that entertained multiple temporalities. It is the first of her novels in which she endeavoured to record life ‘as an endless present moment, moving snail-wise through time, carrying the past and future on its back’. The ‘Christopher’ of the title is the as yet unborn child of two characters, Kay, a nurse and Nigel, a doctor who is a patient under her care. The plot revolves around Linda, Nigel’s wife who is convinced she suffered from a form of hereditary madness which dictates she should not have a child with the man she loves. In its exploration of sexual morality, sexual competition, biology and eugenics, Dark blended romance and realism at the same time as reaching towards a more complex novel of ideas in the modernist tradition.

Created with Web Album Generator