SOURCE: “Representing Failure: Gender and Madness in Henry Kingsley's The Hillyars and the Burtons,” in AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature, Vol. 82, November, 1994, pp. 35-48.

In the following essay, Lee analyzes the gendered discourse of insanity in The Hillyars and the Burtons.

Henry Kingsley's status in Australian literary history rests primarily upon the formal success of his first Australian novel The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859).¹ The critical acclaim for his second Australian novel The Hillyars and the Burtons (1865)² is scant. The attention which this latter narrative has received is primarily directed towards the negative example it provides for an account of the formal development of the Australian novel. In this respect it features as an exemplar of the other in comparisons with Geoffry Hamlyn. The general argument is that while Geoffry Hamlyn represents the successful marriage of the pastoral epic and the romance form, The...