In Somewhere Here the Future’s Hid: The Extraordinary Life of Lesbia Harford, Jeff Sparrow recounts the life of early 20th century Australian poet and novelist Lesbia Harford, whose work was largely unknown until decades after her death at the age of 36. This is a portrait of an assured poet and organiser whose work evinces romantic and political passion against a backdrop of struggle. A “blue baby”, brought up largely in “genteel penury”, Harford’s short life was marked by ill health against which she forged a vigorous path of work, political action, love and literature.
In her lifetime, Harford’s literary reputation rested largely on a single small magazine issue in 1921 dedicated to her work and the inclusion of three poems in Percival Serle’s Australasian poetry anthology. Her public life was more tied to her political activities, including her brief position as vice-president of the Federated Clothing Trades’ Union. While she crossed paths with many literary and political luminaries, her idiosyncratic path – turning away from the legal profession for which she had trained to work in garment factories and political organising, then returning to tutoring, teaching and, at the end of her life, to law – meant that her brief adult life was marked by precarity.
Sparrow takes on the task of piecing this biography together from what remains of a public record, while painting a vivid picture of the political atmosphere of the 1910s and 1920s. The biography is all the more of an achievement for that: he brings the factional interests of socialist and labour movements alive, animating the volatile intellectual debates of the time.
Harford’s personal relationships are intertwined with this political world. Sparrow quotes her poetry liberally to great effect. The poems form both a punctuation and a starting point to Sparrow’s account, whether he is addressing her love and “love lornity” for various women and men, the experience of factory work, or the realities of her fragile existence.
A postscript follows the trajectories of the people who played a significant role in Harford’s life and the process of shepherding her works into print in the decades following her death. The eventual publication of the full scope of her work represents a long path towards establishing her deserved reputation as a major Australian modernist poet. In the long run, Harford outshines most of her literary contemporaries. This biography is another testament to her significance.
Monash University Publishing, 400pp, $34.99