In Louise Mack's An Australian Girl in London, Sylvia Leighton embarks on an increasingly familiar narrative in turn-of-the-century Australian fiction, travelling to England to establish herself in a country she has long dreamed of visiting. Mack's novel describes Sylvia's ambitions and expectations and tracks their complicated fates as they try to settle in London.

As Australia began the process of breaking away from its from status a British colony, Catherine Martin was fascinated with the meaning of Australian culture and identity. She examines these issues through the story of the independent and intelligent Stella Courtland, a young girt who marries and finds herself hampered by the social constraints of her new life. In this sensitive Late of moral and emotional growth, Martin brilliantly captures this turning point in Australian history and anticipates the values of a new generation.

Between 1870 and 1940, tens of thousands of Australian women were drawn to London, their imperial metropolis and the center of the publishing, art, musical, theatrical, and educational worlds. Even more Australian women than men made the pilgrimage "home," seeking opportunities beyond those available to them in the Australian colonies or dominion. In tracing the experiences of these women, this volume reveals hitherto unexamined connections between whiteness, colonial status, gender, and modernity.

Between 1870 and 1940 thousands of Australian women were drawn to London, their imperial metropolis and the centre of the art, publishing, theatrical and educational worlds. This study examines connections between whiteness, colonial status and modernity.

Embraced for the dramatic opportunities afforded by a house full of strangers, the British boarding house emerged as a setting for novels published during the interwar period by a diverse range of women writers from Stella Gibbons to Virginia Woolf. To use the single room in the boarding house or bedsit, Terri Mullholland argues, is to foreground a particular experience. While the single room represents the freedoms of independent living available to women in the early twentieth century, it also marks the precariousness of unmarried women’s lives. By placing their characters in this transient space, women writers could explore women's changing social roles and complex experiences – amateur prostitution, lesbian relationships, extra-marital affairs, and abortion – outside traditional domestic narrative concerns. Mullholland presents new readings of works by canonical and non-canonical writers, including Stella Gibbons, Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, and Virginia Woolf. A hybrid of the modernist and realist domestic fiction written and read by women, the literature of the single room merges modernism's interest in interior psychological states with the realism of precisely documented exterior spaces, offering a new mode of engagement with the two forms of interiority.

Imagined Londons explores the diverse ways that Britain's "global city" has been imagined and represented in literature, history, the arts, and popular culture, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. American and British contributors examine a variety of topics, ranging from poetry to architecture, from dance music to gay pornography, from "tube" maps to the role of Bangladeshi communities in shaping contemporary London politics. Broadly interdisciplinary and deeply attentive to London's historical diversity, the book is unified by its attention to a single question: How have the many imaginations and representations of London shaped -- and been shaped by -- history and culture? The answers provided within this volume offer the chance to view London in surprising new ways.