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Coral Lansbury is well known in Australia as a prize-winning feature and drama writer for the ABC. She once owned a radio and television company, Lansbury Productions, and conducted a talk show.
In the United States, Dr Lansbury has been at the forefront of the animal rights movement and has just published a book in which she explores the roots of the anti-vivisection movement. The book, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers and Vivisections in Edwardian England (University of Wisconsin Press), has received rave reviews. Lansbury does not deal with contemporary animal rights issues in her book, but she does make it clear why the old anti-vivisection movement failed and why the current animal rights movement has been so successful in sensitizing people to animal suffering.
“Animals were not helped when they were made surrogate people,” she says. “Indeed, the old antivivisectionists were often guilty of the worst indignity one species can inflict on another: to rob that species of its own identity.”
Dr Lansbury is now a professor of· English on the Camden campus of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She was inspired to write this, her fifth book, after seeing a reference to the Brown Dog Riots in an old journal in the British Library.
The origins of another Lansbury, book, also just released, are quite different. This book, her first novel, developed after a meeting with feminist members of the Modem Language Association at which the genre of the Gothic novel was discussed.
“I dislike Gothics intensely;” she says, “I think they are manipulative pornography, perhaps the only pornography that women have. I decided to do something never done before to write a serious Gothic novel that is a commentary on the form within the context of the novel.”
The book is titled Ringarra and is scheduled for November publication by Harper and Row in New York. It is described on the jacket as “a highly, original and wonderfully satirical parody of the classic Gothic novel. Read it and you will never again pick·up the real thing and keep a straight face.”
The presses will barely be cool when Lansbury’s second novel, Sweet Alice is published in April 1986. Not many college professors are so prolific. “But you must remember I was a professional writer before I was an academic,” she says.
When In Her Own Image was published in Australia last winter, it was heralded with much hype. Its US release was a lot quieter and surprisingly little has been made of Anna Murdoch’s famous connection.
Library Journal gave the novel its influential Recommended status, saying, that the characterizations, descriptions and plot made up for some awkward writing.
Carolyn Gaiser in the New York Times loved, Murdoch’s compelling portrait of the Australian outback even though she found the symbolic aspects of the weather to be obvious literary contrivances.
New Yorkers might not know much about lamingtons and vegemite sandwiches, but they: fell for Mem Fox’s inimitable storytelling charm at the New York Book Fair at Madison Square Garden in October. She read Possum Magic and Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge, the latter recently released by Kane/Miller in America.
Unlike New York’s is Book Country which attracts the large established book publishers, the New York Book Fair is geared to America’s thriving small presses like Small Pond Magazine, Wry Bread Press, the unspeakable visions of the individual and the publications of the National Association of Nicaraguan Librarians.
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