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Jean Devanny (1894–1962)

Autor(a) de Cindie

13+ Works 150 Membros 6 Reviews 1 Favorited

About the Author

Includes the name: Jean DeVanney

Obras de Jean Devanny

Cindie (1949) 103 cópias
Sugar Heaven (1942) 14 cópias
The Butcher Shop (1981) 14 cópias
Travels in North Queensland (1951) 5 cópias
Bird of Paradise (1945) 3 cópias
Paradise Flow (1985) 2 cópias
Devil made saint 1 exemplar(es)
The virtuous courtesan 1 exemplar(es)
Sugar heaven 1 exemplar(es)
Lenore Divine (2012) 1 exemplar(es)

Associated Works

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Nome padrão
Devanny, Jean
Outros nomes
Crook, Jane
Data de nascimento
1894-01-07
Data de falecimento
1962-03-08
Sexo
female
Nacionalidade
New Zealand (birth)
Australia
Local de nascimento
Ferntown, New Zealand
Local de falecimento
Townsville, Queensland, Australia
Locais de residência
Palmerston North, New Zealand
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Wellington, New Zealand
Ocupação
novelist
columnist
short-story writer
Relacionamentos
Franklin, Miles (friend)
Barnard, Marjorie (friend)
Organizações
Australian Communist Party
Writers League
Pequena biografia
Jean Devanny, née Crook, was born in Ferntown, New Zealand. Her father William Crook was a miner. She attended school until age 13, when she had to leave to care for her mother and younger siblings. In 1911, she met Francis "Hal" Devanny, also a miner and deeply involved in union affairs. They married the same year and had three children. She learned to play the piano and violin, participated in political activity, and joined Marxist study groups. The family moved to various mining towns before settling in Wellington, where they bought a boarding-house, but it was unsuccessful. By the 1920s, Jean had turned to writing. Her best-known work, The Butcher Shop, was published in 1926. She also published a book of short stories and several more novels, expressing her feelings on motherhood, female consciousness and sexuality, and women's rights, as well as issues of left-wing politics. In 1929, the family moved to Australia, believing that a warmer climate would help their son Karl's weak heart, and became involved in the Communist Party of Australia. Jean was one of the founders of the Writers' League, later the Writers' Association, with Katharine Susannah Prichard and Egon Kisch. In 1935, she became the League's first president. She was a close friend and correspondent of Miles Franklin, Marjorie Barnard and Winifred Hamilton, She had had several disagreements with the leadership of the Communist Party that led to her expulsion in 1940. During the 1950s, she wrote many articles and short stories about the northern Queensland region in which she had settled.

Membros

Resenhas

This was a welcome surprise. This is a novel set historically in North Queensland, specifically the sugar cane industry in that state, in the years 1896 to 1906. The state was in upheaval as the quasi-slavery condition of the industry was forced to reckon with a rabid White Australia movement centred on the Labor Party. The indentured labourers from Melanesia on which sugar depended were to be repatriated after Federation and their work was to done by Australians only. This was not because there was any sympathy for the Melanesian labour but because non-whites were not wanted in Australia.
Devanny writes from experience as a speaker for the Movement against War and Fascism in Queensland in the 1930's and it is there she gathered her material for the novel.
The novel exposes the inequalities of colonial settlement even though Cindie ( a most capable servant) and Randolph Biddow (her boss) attempt a non-racist approach to cane farming. Their approach is none-the-less paternalistic and exploitative.
This is a highly readable novel, historically informative and it has a well paced plot. The happy ending is a bit contrived but it can be forgiven, and Cindie herself is a little too much of a goody to be convincing.
… (mais)
 
Marcado
ivanfranko | outras 4 resenhas | Aug 23, 2023 |
Set in 1890s Queensland: when sugar cane plantation owner, Randolph Biddow welcomes his imperious wife, Blanche, and their two children, to the estate,they face a very different lifestyle. Accompanied by their servant, Cindie Comstock, Randolph finds little support from his wife. It's Cindie who develops an all-consuming passion for agriculture, business...and who ably steps up to managing the Aborigene and Kannaka (South Sea Islander) workers.
As Blanche becomes consumed with jealousy at Cindie's untiring competence, becoming Randolph's second-in-command, the state faces political upheaval with the White Australia movement agitating for the return of ethnic minorities to their homeland (as the farmers fear the possible impact of such a move on their work.
It was a pretty compulsive read; written in 1949, the author can be more outspoken about certain topics than a contemporary writer would.
I'm not at all sure I could buy the selfless workaholic nature of Cindie, and - like the reviewer below- the final denouement felt...unlikely.
… (mais)
1 vote
Marcado
starbox | outras 4 resenhas | Aug 18, 2023 |
Last week there was a substantial donation from an Australian mining magnate to the bushfire relief effort. While all donations are much needed, reactions varied, from approval of the philanthropic gesture, to outrage that our economic system enables an individual to be in a position to give away $70 million. I myself was stunned, that in my lifetime, the society I live in has shifted so far away from the egalitarian Australia of my youth that such extremes of wealth exist here. And I wondered what kind of person had all that money to spare but in the period before the fires didn't think of donating that $70 million to redress poverty and disadvantage in our society.

[caption id="attachment_98290" align="alignright" width="199"] Jean Devanny c 1949 (Wikipedia*)[/caption]

My dismay about how this donation dramatically symbolises how unfair our society has become, coincides with my reading of Sugar Heaven (1936) by Jean Devanny, (1894-1962) described by Editor Nicole Moore in the Introduction as:
...a revolutionary Communist, novelist, feminist, prodigious platform agitator, birth control activist and eugenicist, travel writer, mother, party worker and theorist of the family and 'the sex life'. (p.8)

Devanny's words in chapter 28 are prophetic of today's mindset, though I doubt that she intended it that way:
The Inspector swelled with indignation. 'Don't come here with your lies. You take my advice and forget all about this Communism rubbish. Where do you think it will get you, anyhow? When you're old men with beards the people will point you out in the street and say, 'Yes, he was a great old fighter but look at him now. No use to us.' You take my advice and try individualism. Get what you can out of life without bothering about the other fellow.' (p.212)

According to Jean-François Vernay, in The Great Australian Novel—a Panorama, Devanny's 11th novel Sugar Heaven belongs in the company of other Australian socialist realist novels:
Imported from the Soviet Union where it originated under the pen of Andreï Zhdanov, socialist realism, fashionable in Australian in the 1940s and 1950s, can be defined as a form of neutral expression — that tries to describe ordinary people. As an aesthetic theory that has art as a form of social conscience, socialist realism transcends the writer's individualism, speaks of the people and reproduces historical reality. The Battlers (1941, see my review), Kylie Tennant's third novel, has documentary value and is perhaps one of the most moving in its description of rejects from the Great War. This was a period for the proletarian novel with titles such as Upsurge (1943) by John Harcourt, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934, see my review) by Christina Stead, Sugar Heaven (1936) by Jean Devanny, Intimate Strangers (1937, on my TBR) by Katherine Susannah Prichard, The Little Company (1945, see my review) by Eleanor Dark, How Beautiful Are Thy Feet (1949) by Alan Marshall, and Power without Glory (1950) by Frank Hardy.
Jean-François Vernay, The Great Australian Novel—a Panorama (2010), Brolga Publishing, ISBN 9781921596391, p 63)

[caption id="attachment_90486" align="alignright" width="195"] Cover of the 2002 scholarly edition, see * below re copyright over the first edition cover[/caption]

Devanny's novel of Queensland sugar cane country is quintessentially Australian, but she was from New Zealand. Born Jane Crook in Collingwood in the Nelson Region (South Island), she came from a working class rural family with strong politics, an alcoholic father and a penchant for intensity and artistic expression. She migrated to Australia in 1929 when she was in her middle thirties, and ended up in Townsville in Queensland where she died aged 68. Despite some efforts to revive her place in literary history—not the least of which is the 2002 scholarly edition that I've just read—Devanny remains little-known today and interested readers will have to do what I did and seek out second-hand copies of her work.

I first heard of Devanny from Jean-François Vernay's A Brief Take on the Australian Novel (see here) but I'd forgotten all about that by the time I came across an allusion to her in Kristina Olsson's Shell where she features as one of a number of forgotten women writers (see here). I don't think that Devanny is mentioned in Geordie Williamson's The Burning Library (see here) but (annoyingly) his plea for the rescue of Australia’s forgotten literary achievement isn't indexed so I can't be sure. Somewhat acerbically, academic Carole Ferrier remarks in her essay in this scholarly edition that predictably, Devanny isn't mentioned in the Oxford History of Australian Literature (which I don't have) and I didn't find her in Geoffrey Dutton's The Literature of Australia either, but there is a brief profile and Chapter 4 of Sugar Heaven excerpted in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009 edition).

Devanny herself claimed that Sugar Heaven is the first really proletarian novel in Australia so (as Nicole Moore says in the Introduction) it has historical value. But does it stand up as a novel that 21st century readers might want to read in its own right? Well, I found it hard work.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/01/15/sugar-heaven-by-jean-devanny/
… (mais)
 
Marcado
anzlitlovers | Jan 14, 2020 |
I quite enjoyed this look at a sugar cane plantation in Queensland during the White Australia movement (1896-1907 were the years covered in the book). At age nineteen Cindie goes to the new farm as the servant of the farmer's wife but immediately falls in love with the land and works like a man to make the farm a success, later introducing timbering and coffee to the plantation. She and her boss recognize the South Sea islanders, the Kanakas, that he hires (although that's not an accurate description of what he does) and the Aborigines as humans and treat them with dignity even as they exploit their labor. Devanny, herself a Communist, has written a sort of problem novel, and that's my main problem with it.
It's clear that describing and explaining the political and human ramifications of Australian unification are more important to her than the crafting of a novel as a work of art. Most of the time that didn't matter because she did tell a compelling story to support her concerns. I just couldn't quite believe in Cindie herself. Her motivation for staying with the Biddows was not adequately explained to me when she was offered marriage by a man whom she liked and respected, who would have given her her own farm to develop. Her romance at the end of the book struck me as equally contrived. Those quibbles aside, I was fascinated with the time and place and with some of the other characters.
… (mais)
½
5 vote
Marcado
LizzieD | outras 4 resenhas | May 2, 2012 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
13
Also by
4
Membros
150
Popularidade
#138,700
Avaliação
3.9
Resenhas
6
ISBNs
17
Idiomas
1
Favorito
1

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