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Holmwood is the novel which constitutes the major work submitted towards my PhD in Creative Writing. It is accompanied in a second volume by an exegesis of the generative and governing notions which I deem to bear on this work. The novel is a contemporary Australian fiction set in the city of Adelaide and focusing on a period of a month or so in the entwined lives of two sisters, Evie and Paula Haggerty, women in their forties. Holmwood grows out of my abiding preoccupation with the acculturation of women worldwide towards a muting and dilution of selfhood and identity, but it is a novel rather than a tract, attempting in particular a psychological verisimilitude and therefore situated largely within the minds of the central characters, who refract and provide a slant on the narrative. Evie and Paula are bound in family bonds and by shared responsibility for Paula' s children. The sisters work in early-child -care and aged-care respectively, their work scenarios providing a context and perspective for their mid-life entanglements with new partners and ongoing struggles with unresolved birth-family and young-adult relationship dilemmas. The close connections of both sisters with adolescents points up their residual attachment to a youth-culture neither has definitively left. I propose the Haggerty sisters as modest heroines of a difficult chapter in history, not alert to all the meanings of their lives, indeed actively repressing many of them, damaged by early life-experiences, but victorious, to a great degree, against the challenges of their adult lives. I hope this is an amusing and insightful novel about women of a certain age. It is squarely aimed at an identifiable market, thirty-plus women readers bored with 'chick lit'. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Humanities, 2005.

The eighteenth-century female of sensibility was characterized by delicate nerves that allowed her to feel her surroundings and enabled her to choose virtue over vice more consistently than males. While females were considered virtuous, their "innate" delicacy or weakness became their dominant trait and the true focus of male admiration. Although critics have already observed that Jane Austen's novels work against this idealization of feminine weakness, not one has recognized exactly how Austen transforms the female of sensibility tradition. Austen dissociates a female's delicacy from her virtue, making the primary source of virtue intellect and, in doing so, relocates male desire on to a female's inner self. Her novels work in progression to achieve this goal. Sense and Sensibility exposes delicacy's negative effects. Subsequent novels transform the sensibility tradition using two strategies. In Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, several relationships demonstrate the different ways a dissociation and relocation can occur. Emma and Persuasion employ the second strategy: the problem of illusion. The existence of a weak female as attractive proves only to be delusive and is ultimately rejected by the novels' characters and readers. Hence, these five novels progressively use not only male and female interactions but characters' and readers' perceptions to eliminate the idea of feminine weakness in Austen's fictional world. / Graduation date: 1999

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Germanic and Slavic Languages, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 94-99).

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2006. / Title from title screen. Layli Phillips, committee chair; Margaret Mills Harper, Carol Marsh-Lockett, committee members. Electronic text (64 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Apr. 20, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 57-64).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 641-666).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 207-218). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DX218785.