ELDERSHAW, M. Barnard

   Collaborative pseudonym used by Australian writers and critics Marjorie Faith Barnard (1897-1987) and Flora Sydney Patricia Eldershaw (1897-1956) for four well regarded mainstream novels 1929-37; nearly all the writing was done by Barnard - who had published a solo book as early as 1920 - with Eldershaw being the critical editorial eye. A fifth novel, also published as by MBE and the most distinguished work under this pseudonym, was by Barnard alone: Tomorrow and Tomorrow (cut 1947; text restored vt Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow 1983 UK) is a political novel whose framing story is set in the 24th century, where a historical novelist living in the Tenth Commune (once the Riverina) has written a book about Australia from 1924 to c1950, the years of Depression and WWII. The novel within a novel, entitled Little World Left Behind, is a striking picture of an Australia well known to Barnard, seen as if from a future perspective. As she had finished writing the book by 1944, the later events of WWII and its supposed aftermath - including the burning of Sydney by its anguished inhabitants - are pure sf, as is the future in which the novelist lives, a blighted, indifferent UTOPIA. Indeed the whole novel is very sophisticated, very unusual sf, part of whose subject is the elusiveness of HISTORY and its relation to fiction.The book's publisher, unknown to Barnard, submitted it before publication to the censor, who saw it as politically subversive and therefore mutilated the latter part, thus bearing witness to the same repressive forces that give the novel its theme; later editions have the text restored.

   PN

   See also: AUSTRALIA.