(On reading Judith Brett’s biography of Beatrice Faust)
If it was not for my interest in all things Henry Handel Richardson, I may not have picked up Judith Brett’s new biography of the Melbourne-based activist, writer and public intellectual, Beatrice Faust – Fearless Beatrice Faust: Sex, Power and Body Politics (Text Publishing, 2025). Discussing her new book on the radio Brett mentioned that Faust (known to her friends as ‘Bea’), had written her MA thesis on HHR. How interesting, I thought, and rushed to the library to reserve a copy of the book. I’m not sorry I did: there are many reasons to read and enjoy this excellent biography.
Faust lived eighty years mainly in Melbourne. During the 1970s and 80s she was seen, heard and read as she debated important public issues, mainly concerning women’s rights, abortion, censorship and human sexuality. She is remembered as a founder of the Women’s Electoral Lobby that brought women’s issues to the forefront of political debate. Brett fleshes out the events and ideas informing these debates from the 1960s to the 90s. She also gives us a close up view of Bea the complex person who lived, loved, suffered and triumphed in turn; one who, as the title suggests, was always up for the fight.
Bea endured sufferings throughout her life including the death of her mother soon after Bea’s birth. As an adult she suffered debilitating and painful illnesses. Despite these intense difficulties she led a purposeful, productive and interesting life that helped create the social conditions for others to grow and prosper. In this she was greatly assisted by the excellent education she received especially during her formative teenage years at MacRobetson Girls’ High School. Her matriculation results were outstanding with honours including a shared Exhibition in Literature. She gained entry into Melbourne University in 1957 on a coveted Commonwealth Scholarship and a residential scholarship at Women’s College. As Judith Brett comments, girls at MacRob ‘were told they could do anything; when they left they
met barriers and condescension…at university life was far more complicated’. Melbourne University was, writes Brett, ‘a man’s world’.
Bea enrolled in an English honours degree, a difficult course with unacknowledged ‘class dimensions’ attending the fees and time involved, and a degree of ‘intellectual snobbery’ towards mere ‘pass’ students. Her first year results were disappointing and she switched to a combined English and History honours degree.
Bea had hopes for a life in academia if not as an academic herself, then as the wife of an academic according to one of Brett’s sources. She did indeed marry while at university, an affair that lasted a year. Her husband Clive Faust was a poet and philosopher who Bea admired for his intellectual brilliance though she came to believe ‘that he had encouraged her to overvalue rationality and objectivity at the expense of emotion and intuition’. She kept the name ‘Faust’ as her own for the rest of her life.
The opportunity for Bea to gain an academic career was eluding her. She was not alone in this. Both she and her friend, the legendary Germaine Greer, were denied high honours at the end of their degrees, and were therefore denied offers of the tutorships which were a toehold onto the ladder of academia. In 1965, following Greer’s example, she decided to enrol in an MA; she would write on Henry Handel Richardson.
Brett describes the thesis as ‘a substantial piece of work that looked at all the published novels and stories’ . She also notes that Bea contacted HHR’s literary executor, Olga Roncoroni, and her nephew, Walter Neustatter. Bea did not receive the high honours she was seeking for her thesis due perhaps in part to Richardson’s unpopularity within the English department where modernist writers such as Woolf and Joyce were preferred while HHR’s ‘naturalism’ was regarded as ‘anachronistic’. Brett believes the thesis was marked down due to ‘ideological battles taking place in the discipline…’ In addition she points to ‘the close link between high honours and academic employment’, and, while academic jobs were opening up at Monash and La Trobe, Bea ‘lacked a patron to fight her corner, and some of the examiners may not have wanted her as a colleague’.
Brett has used Bea’s thesis to flesh out some fascinating details about the culture of Melbourne university in the 1960s, touching on its gender-based power structures; she also allows it to speak to Bea’s inner world. Literature, she says, helped students ‘understand their own and their friends’ lives’. This was certainly the case for Bea when she chose Richardson’s books for close study. In them, especially in Ultima Thule, the final book of the Mahony trilogy, Bea identified with Cuffy Mahony and her miserable childhood. She was, writes Brett, ‘…drawn to books that touched her pain’. In Bea’s notebooks Brett found annotations to the thesis that ‘drew parallels between her own and Richardson’s experiences’. She believed that ‘the desire to control’, demonstrated by Richardson’s ‘compulsive attachment to routine’, was ‘admission of being adrift in a chaotic world’. Bea recognised this tendency in herself and worked to overcome the neurosis.
I have concentrated here on the story of Bea’s formal education mainly at Melbourne University quoting from Brett’s book to bring together the story around Bea’s MA thesis on HHR. This is one small rivulet in the river of Beatrice Faust as traced by Judith Brett. The biography was urged to life by a number of Bea’s friends who approached Judith Brett to write it. That in itself is testimony to the love and respect held for the amazing ‘Fearless’ Beatrice Faust.
At the end of the book Brett reflects on Bea’s voice in the media of her time and acknowledges its ephemeral nature but making a moving claim for biography as
‘…small dams against the ebb of time…’
Lucky readers: we can plunge in to play in the waters.