ALISON BOOTH The Philosopher’s Daughters. Reviewed by Kim Kelly
The fifth novel from Australian author Alison Booth, The Philosopher’s Daughters is an intriguing and energetic historical fiction that takes us from the genteel world of 1890s London parlour-chat to the sun-crisped, trackless outback of the Northern Territory.
The story centres on the lives of Sarah and Harriet, marriageable daughters of progressively minded gentleman James Cameron. The sisters are afforded a freedom to explore life few women enjoyed at the time, but this novel takes us well beyond the trope of the feisty female hero battling the odds, and avoids the anachronistic sensationalism of some other examples of the genre. As fate and love take the sisters one after the other into the unknown of Australia – to remote Dimbulah Station, where Sarah’s adventure-seeking husband takes a position as manager – the narrative dives deeply into the young women’s individual natures and yearnings.
The relationship between the sisters, as well as their inner lives and talents – Sarah is a musician and Harriet is an artist – are complex, nuanced and rich with development, as are all their significant external relationships. This is especially evident in their experiences of the landscape of the outback, a character in itself. The harshness of the Northern Territory light brings increasing self-knowledge with every challenge it throws at the women. And the challenges are many:
In the middle of the day, the temperature was in the low nineties Fahrenheit, and the light was blinding. You couldn’t roll up your sleeves in the sunlight without getting burned. There were flies in the daytime and mosquitoes at night. And everywhere there was dust: remorseless dust that covered everything. Sarah could never get it out from under her fingernails: they were permanently bordered in red dust.
Then there is the relentless work expected of outback women, not merely in tackling endless home duties but in camping out when necessary, learning to ride long distances and to fire a gun for their own safety. The brown snake, an almost obligatory creature in Australian fiction set in the bush, is a sure death sentence here, and while it engenders terrible fear, it teaches Sarah that she is a crack shot – a skill that will save a life, and show this sister what she’s really made of. More insidious is the threat of sexual attack from white men, and, in turn, frontier-war attack from Aboriginal men seeking justice for wrongs committed against them.
Indigenous characters are given full life on the page, truths told with cold facts and clear-eyed sympathy. When Harriet falls in love – oh, so tenderly – with Aboriginal stockman Mick Spencer, it is their shared interest in landscape painting that draws them close, and he gives her gifts of enlightenment about herself that she otherwise might never have known. Refreshingly, Booth presents all of her outback and working-class characters with a sense of hard-wrought reality, free of stereotyping, too – bad guys, ugliness and foolishness can come from any quarter. The middle-class ladies at the centre of the story are only ‘good’ because they have been taught to be curious, to consider evidence, to think for themselves, to learn – and it’s a privilege neither of the sisters waste. It’s this touch that makes the novel credibly and satisfyingly human.
The philosophy that underpins the story seems a little elusive, however; apart from glimpses of Charles Darwin’s work, and general humanist and suffragist ideals, we are never really invited into the deeper intellectual concerns of Sarah and Harriet’s father to be able to follow the book-reading breadcrumbs of what exactly has informed his thinking. But this lively novel is not one that dwells long in any backstory. It is a page-turner in the best sense: a story that causes us to emotionally invest in and care for the futures of two appealing and interesting protagonists, where the stakes involve love, of course, but also their sense of themselves.
It’s Booth’s rendering of the land that makes this story sing, though, and many of her descriptions deftly combine a sensual beauty with informative detail:
Staring up at the sky webbed with stars, she felt herself rising up to meet them. Rising above the campsite, looking down on the rugged territory: the rivers, the plateau and, a few miles east, the telegraph line snaking its way south. A two-chain-wide avenue kept clear by a line party that moved up and down it, repairing the lines, hacking away at the encroaching grasses and shrubs and forests, maintaining the link between the South and Europe … Telegraph wires that hummed with the lives of others, with the news from Home.
With dual love stories, sweeping vistas, and even a heart-stopping moment of drama – all of it intelligently and insightfully drawn – The Philosopher’s Daughters will appeal to those readers who love Judy Nunn’s rollicking tales. But the depth of its political, cultural, colonialist and feminist themes will also make it the perfect next book for those who have recently enjoyed Pip Williams’ The Dictionary of Lost Words and Maggie Joel’s The Unforgiving City.
This is a novel with some important things to say, and it does so in every wonderfully entertaining and delightfully romantic way. At its essence, here’s a story of what it means to be a real woman grappling with whatever life throws at her, and, in two quite different ways, growing stronger and more vibrant for the effort.
Alison Booth The Philosopher’s Daughters RedDoor Press 2020 PB 320pp $24.99
Kim Kelly is the author of ten novels, including the acclaimed Wild Chicory and The Blue Mile. Her latest, Her Last Words,was published in July 2020. Find out more about Kim at: kimkellyauthor.com
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Thank you Kim Kelly for this shimmering, beautifully written review. Its on my list for sure.
Thank you, Suzanne. I hope you enjoy this novel, too.