| Popis: |
This partial biography of West Australian nurse and author, Mary Louisa (Mollie) Skinner (1876-1955), is an in-depth study of the period covered by her posthumously published autobiography The Fifth Sparrow (1972), which was itself an edited and sanitized version of her 1952 memoir. It is also an experiment in biographical method, shaped by the Buddhist concept Anatta (essencelessness, or soullessness). The study brings to light many of Skinner’s hitherto undiscovered writings and much of the subtext concerning the influence this once well-connected woman was able to wield. It also interrogates the point of view that her collaboration with D H Lawrence on the novel The Boy in the Bush was an ‘unlikely’ one. Using Skinner’s conceptualisations of ‘The Hand of God’ as external agent, along with Lawrence's conceptualisations of the ‘Biological Psyche’, it outlines the struggle to ‘be someone’ in light of existential insubstantiality. In so doing, it undermines the depiction of biographical subject as instigatory agent. Anatta is a concept resonating throughout contemporary cognitive science and is therefore, it is here argued, an ideal biographical tool. |
