Louisa

Louisa is a biography of Louisa Lawson, the mother of Henry Lawson and a major reformer, innovator and journalist in her own right.This work's first edition won several prizes including being chosen as the best Commonwealth non-fiction book for 1988 in The Years Work in English, 1989. It received glowing reviews, but also attracted controversy because of its iconoclastic attitude toward biography, and its unconventional style, presentation and handling of evidence. Louisa continued to be cited, argued about, quoted from and used in various courses and seminars over the next decade. The radical form of the book - a number of 'voices' arguing, contributing, undercutting each other - brought the very practice of biography itself into question...