A Wife's Heart: The Untold Story of Bertha and Henry Lawson
Kerrie Davies
University of Queensland Press, $29.95
This is a sympathetic, often quite moving portrait of a deeply troubled and unhappy marriage. It's also a personal tale of the author's marriage breakdown and her life as a single mother. And it's this constant interplay, the correspondences that Kerrie Davies discovers between her life and Bertha Lawson's – bringing up the children, post-Henry – that give this study resonance and poignancy. Lawson may be a national literary treasure, but behind the smiling portraits and the sad, droopy moustache, was a dark side – alcoholism and domestic violence – and, to an extent, Davies' portrait of Bertha and Henry is also a study of the damage that the myth of the romantic artist as bedevilled genius can do. But it's nuanced, Davies incorporating the memories of the Lawsons' daughter and testimony from Mary Gilmore that tells another story.