But just as I am an advocate for revising the way we look at early Australian writing to emphasise positive role models for young women, so I am happy in this case for women in the great blossoming of second wave feminism and sexual liberation to look again at earlier women’s relationships.

I suspect that she is right, and that the loving, sexual partnership of Patience and Sarah owes a lot more to the 1960s when it was written than to the early C19th when it is set. Sylvia Martin writes that she doubts they had the language to even imagine a sexual relationship. And what we know about them, their lives together, other than that they were ‘companions’ is very little. In my occasional research into the archetypal Independent Woman I sometimes run into lesbian stories, or possibly lesbian stories, women who eschew marriage not for independent lives but to live with another woman, say Catherine Helen Spence with Jeanne Young or Mary Fullerton and Mabel Singleton, there’s quite a few. I thought maybe, get my fingers moving on the keyboard, knock out a few lines, it’ll come back, but of course it hasn’t.Ī couple of audiobooks ago I listened to Patience & Sarah (1969) by Isabel Miller, historical fiction, romance, thoroughly enjoyable. I read years ago that you should never write a book in your head, all that creation is wasted, and it might be the best you ever wrote. Don’t you hate it when you’re driving along, or mucking out the stables, or cleaning house, working on autopilot, mapping out a post with perfect opening lines that say just what you want to say, and when you sit down at your desk, or your laptop on the steering wheel, there’s nothing there.

Patience & Sarah by Isabel Miller