Drusilla Modjeska’s Exiles at Home is one of the foundational works of Australian feminist literary criticism.

Written at a moment when women’s writing in Australia was still marginal to the canon, it reconstructs the intellectual and emotional worlds of writers working between the wars. Those figures often treated as minor, domestic, or merely “regional.”

Modjeska reads them instead as modernists negotiating exile within their own country. Women constrained by nationalism, gender expectation, and the cultural cringe, yet formally ambitious and politically alert.

The book sits alongside second-wave recovery projects internationally, but remains distinctly Australian in its attention to landscape, class, and literary inheritance.