Catherine Gaskin

This week, a friend introduced me to an Irish-Australian historical novelist called Catherine Gaskin, who died in 2009. I had never heard of Catherine Gaskin but I Googled her and, interested in what I read about her life and work, I bought one of her most famous novels, Sara Dane, and downloaded it to my Kindle.
Sara Dane is about a young woman sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay for theft, really all owing to a broken romance and a misunderstanding (and having no-one to speak up for her).
I’m about half way through, and you know, Sara Dane has stood the test of time rather well. It’s excellently researched (especially the details of the ghastly transportation ship), all done in an age before writers had access to the internet. Some of the language is beautiful, particularly the passages describing the homestead Sara and her husband build, and the story moves at a cracking pace.
Not all of the story will ‘chime’ with modern readers. I found the main character of Sara Dane a bit cold but you would be, if you had to survive the horrors of a transportation ship on your wits alone. However, given that it was first published in 1955, there is enough ‘grit’ and action to appeal to those of us used to a diet of hard-nosed US crime fiction.
It’s funny, as soon as I mentioned Catherine Gaskin to my aunt, she said that she used to read all her books. This got me thinking about fashions in literature: how writers such as Catherine Gaskin, Elizabeth Goudge and Monica Dickens (you can possibly think of many other examples) have fallen out of favour now but were once in every bookshop in the land.
Catherine Gaskin was also an historical novelist and there are really two layers you are considering when you read historical novelists from a few decades back: the historical period in which their story is set but also the time in which that novelist was writing (in this case, the 1950s). So, for example, Catherine Gaskin would have had to leave the bedroom scenes at the bedroom door because she was writing in a much less liberal climate.
And perhaps this is one of the reasons novelists do fall out of favour: ‘fashions’, tastes and attitudes change and no novelist has a crystal ball and can only write about what they feel and experience at that particular moment in time.
Catherine Gaskin is also listed in Wikipedia as a ‘romance novelist’ and even though that is possibly a fair assumption, I wonder how the term ‘romance’ is often used to downgrade and dismiss women writers (a little like the term ‘chick lit’ today).
And that’s possibly a debate for another day…

ends