Wakefield Press acquires Edwina Preston's novel of art, motherhood and 'selfishness'

Wakefield Press is delighted to announce the acquisition of Edwina Preston’s novel of women artists struggling to make their mark in 1960s bohemian Melbourne, provisionally titled Veda Grey, via agent Jenny Darling. Publication is projected for May 2022.

Read more about this exciting new acquisition below!

Associate publisher Jo Case says the novel is a timely, beautifully crafted and vividly imagined contribution to still-blazing debates about gender: who gets to be an artist or writer, and who is responsible for parenting and other forms of care. ‘I was quickly immersed in the bohemian Melbourne on the page – the art, the restaurants, the bohemian literary scene – and most of all, the restless, intelligent, deliberately undomestic wife, mother and poet Veda, who fairly crackles with stifled ambition and barely constrained anger. I’m so excited that I get to publish this book!’

Preston’s first book was a biography of artist Howard Arkley (Not Just a Suburban Boy, Duffy and Snellgrove), and her debut novel, The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer, was published by UQP in 2012. Her writing has appeared in the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, Griffith Review, Australian Book Review and more.

'This novel emerged from thinking about selfishness in art, and the ways in which creative selfishness is culturally enabled in male artists under the ruse of 'genius', but remains fraught and complex for women — especially women artists who are mothers,’ says Preston.

Frustrated poet Veda Grey, her career long ago squashed by a scandal, is resurrected when a feminist publishing house posthumously resurrects her work – in collaboration with her son, Owen, who falls for the publisher. Veda’s story unfolds as Owen reflects on his boyhood in the Melbourne suburbs, and in the vibrant bohemian inner-city art scene where his kind but absent restaurateur father was a king. Meanwhile, the talented women in their orbit – Veda, artist and restaurant worker Rosa, Mrs Parish, wife of an influential poet – push against gender expectations to be recognised as legitimate artists, by their intimates and the wider world. And as Owen is encouraged to ‘be a man’, he loses something of himself, too. Blending wit and pathos, love and fury, ambition and loss, this is an extraordinary novel of love and art – and what they both give and demand from us.

‘The women artists in this novel have different temperaments and make different choices to pursue art, yet their way was narrow and their means limited. While the novel is set in the 1960s, I think these dilemmas are still potent, still unresolved, for women,’ Preston says.

‘Other questions grew as I wrote: questions about the gendering of care and the ways in which men prosecute a fiction of self-sufficiency. A boy child has to learn this self-sufficiency, rehearse it and wear its mantle. In the process, something in himself is necessarily injured.' 

 Agent Jenny Darling says: ‘In this electrifying novel, Edwina Preston’s kaleidoscopic approach to the life of the poet Veda Grey engages us in multiple spaces: around the possibility of being both an artist and a mother; the importance of nourishment, literally and figuratively; and the gendering of concepts of care. The changing landscapes of Melbourne, suburban and bohemian, in the period of post-war immigration, provide the backdrop.’

'I'm so glad to be working with Jo Case, who really gets everything I was trying to do in this novel,’ concludes Preston. ‘It has been a long time getting to this point and I am thrilled that my own creative work, buffeted by the demands of children but also enriched by them on every level, will find its way out to the world with Wakefield behind it.'