Helen Somerset grows up in a neglected suburban house overlooking Port Phillip Bay, constrained by a father who offers little affection and even less preparation for the world.

His death releases her into working Melbourne, where she is given a swift education in how limited a woman’s apparent freedom remains when every available path is shaped by money, reputation and male permission. First published in 1917, Painted Clay is striking for placing modern urban life—rather than the bush—at the centre of Australian fiction.

Boake, the pen name of Doris Boake Kerr, draws on her own experience as a shop assistant, secretary and bookkeeper to render women’s work without decorative sentiment. The novel can be uneven, but its social texture is the point: Melbourne appears as a network of class distinctions, compromised households and new forms of independence arriving before anyone has developed a moral vocabulary adequate to them. 

This is a sharp early novel of female self-formation, particularly good on the gulf between economic independence and actual autonomy. 

Virago Modern Classics paperback, 1986, with an introduction by Christine Downer. Creasing, rubbing and edge wear to covers; binding remains sound.