Marjorie Barnard

Fiction and Nonfiction Writer

• Born: August 16, 1897
• Birthplace: Ashfield, New South Wales, Australia
• Died: May 8, 1987
• Place of death: Australia

Biography

Marjorie Barnard was born in Ashfield, Australia, on August 16, 1897, the only child of an accountant and his wife. Their marital difficulties strained Barnard’s relationship with her father. Instructed by a governess until the age of ten, Barnard completed preparatory course work at Sydney Girls’ High School. At the University of Sydney, she studied history under George Arnold Wood, earning her B.A. with honors in 1920. Offered a graduate position at Oxford, she declined due to her father’s disapproval of her travel abroad.

A lifelong friendship and literary partnership commenced when Barnard met Flora Sydney Patricia Eldershaw in college. Sharing a passion for writing, the two entered a contest for new novelists launched by the Sydney Bulletin in 1928. Submitted under the pseudonym M. Barnard Eldershaw, A House is Built tied for first place. Their inaugural novel received both national and international accolades; consequently, additional M. Barnard Eldershaw collaborations followed. In the 1920’s, Barnard met writer Frank Dalby Davison through her association with the Fellowship of Australian Writers. Though they became lovers, they never married, Barnard citing her own unhappy childhood as her reason for remaining single.

Solo and in collaboration with Eldershaw, Barnard penned novels and works of nonfiction exploring the history and culture of the Australia she loved. Unable to support herself on writing alone, Barnard worked as a librarian, first at Sydney Technical College (1920-1935) and later at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization Library (1942-1950). The CSIR commissioned her to compose a history of radar; the unpublished manuscript, “One Single Weapon,” was completed in 1946. In the intervening years (1936-1941), and following a nervous breakdown, Barnard freelanced. During this fruitful sabbatical, Barnard coauthored three works with Eldershaw: the novels Green Memory (1931) and The Glasshouse (1936), and the nonfiction Plaque with Laurel (1937), a collection of essays, reviews, and letters.

A vociferous pacifist and antifascist in the 1930’s, Barnard faced repercussions for her antiwar views in the subsequent decade. The science fiction Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947), which envisioned a violent future for citizens of Sydney, was edited so severely by censors that the novel proved a commercial and critical failure. A discouraged Barnard never again wrote fiction, but she embraced nonfiction. Her profound interest in history, nurtured by Professor Wood in her undergraduate years and enhanced by years of research as a librarian, was resurrected. Of her historical works, Macquarie’s World, a study of Tasmania, was most highly regarded.

In addition to receiving, with Flora Eldershaw, the best novel award for a work by an Australian writer in 1928, Barnard was individually honored with the Medal of the Order of Australia in 1980 and was the recipient of the Patrick White Award in 1983. Following the publication of Miles Franklin (1967), Barnard spent the last decades of her life in relative obscurity, writing infrequently, her former bestsellers increasingly out of print. Her literary contributions might have been lost had it not been for the second-wave feminist movement in Australia, which sought in the 1970’s to recover and reassess works by neglected women writers, in particular those like Barnard whose reputations had been damaged by political fallout. In 1983, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was reissued in its entirety, receiving at last the acclaim denied the earlier diluted version.