Falling between the cracks : Dora Wilcox and the neglected Tasman writing world

The poet Dora Wilcox (1873–1953) lived and worked in a world of colonial and Australasian literary networks that created and encouraged her multiple affiliations. As a New Zealander who moved to Australia, however, the influence of mid-century cultural nationalism did not allow her to retain a place in literary history because of her movement between New Zealand, Australia and Britain, her poetic genre and her gender. This paper examines contemporary evaluations of Wilcox to reconstruct the workings of the Tasman writing world within which she operated. The false divisions between writers who stayed and writers who left, and women’s and men’s writing, have led to an inaccurate picture of the opportunities available to writers outside the literary academy. Wilcox’s legacy was affected by the decline of trans-Tasman literary networks that shut out writers not wholly engrossed with the task of contributing to ‘national literature.’ The extra obstacles that women writers already faced were increased due to the masculinist takeover of national literary establishments in New Zealand and Australia. Wilcox still languishes in obscurity despite a number of recent reassessments of early twentieth century Australasian literature on its own terms.