Kiera Lindsey has done it again! Meticulously researched, imaginatively written, and lavishly illustrated, Wild Love reconstructs with breathtaking vividness the passionate life of Adelaide Ironside and the rapidly changing world of which she was a part. A spectacular achievement.’ — Professor Kevin A. Morrison, editor of Global Nineteenth-Century Studies
Kiera Lindsey’s Wild Love brings together both archival fragments and informed speculation to illuminate the life of Adelaide Ironside. No other method could allow a portraiture of this colonial-born Australian artist to be drawn in such detail. — Professor Melanie Nolan, Director, National centre of Biography, Australian National University
A magical book – spellbinding storytelling … breathtaking biography. —Professor Donna Lee Brien, co-editor Routledge, Literature and Food.
An enchanting story of a brilliant young woman who lived, and died, for her art. — Sue Williams, author of Elizabeth and Elizabeth.
In her confident flirtation with the historical record and biographical writing, Kiera Lindsey’s Wild Love recovers the exploits of the extraordinary artist Adelaide Ironside. This delightful book recounts the surprising experiences of women across generations, traversing the streets of colonial Sydney to the artistic salons of Rome in the pursuit of creative freedoms’.— Professor Kate Darian-Smith, University of Tasmania
This bold work of imagination and research is as startling as the wild paintings that made Ironside famous. —Dr William Pooley, Modern History, University of Bristol
To purchase Wild Love, please visit Allen & Unwin.
ABOUT WILD LOVE
WILD LOVE is the story of Adelaide Ironside, the first professional Australian-born female artist. As Adelaide, or Aesi as she liked to be known, was also a republican poet with a great ‘enthusiasm for the invisible’, this book also explores how the mysterious world of Victorian Spiritualism provided many nineteenth-century women with a degree of authority and self-expression often otherwise denied.
Publicity photograph of Adelaide Ironside taken in 1860s SL NSW ML
Although Aesi grew up in colonial Sydney at a time when convicts still worked the streets, her talent and ambition compelled her to travel to Victorian London, where many famous figures were struck by her wild and ‘fireworkey’ personality, including John Ruskin, then the most celebrated art critic of his age. Arriving in Italy in 1856, Aesi and her mother, Martha, became swept up in the battle for Italian unification, as well as the fraught world of gossipy expatriate life presided over by the world’s then most famous poet couple, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning.
To follow in Adelaide’s footsteps as she set upon her dream to become the first ‘Mistress of Art in the Southern Hemisphere’, I trekked the North Shore, caught vessels across Sydney Harbour, sought out the expertise of botanic illustrators, portraitists and oil painters and walked about the parts of London where she and other sister painters struggled to be taken seriously by their Pre-Raphaelite peers. I then spent months in Rome, where Aesi met the Prince of Wales and so charmed Pope Pius IX that she persuaded him to grant her permission to see Fra Angelico’s frescos in a monastery which explicitly excluded women. After visiting the Vatican’s Secret Archives, I followed my heroine onto Florence to see these sumptuous works and stand in the green-walled parlour where Aesi once scried her crystal ball for the Brownings.
Despite Aesi’s hard-won fame, many of her works were lost or so badly neglected after her death that a celebrated collection of forty watercolour Australian wildflowers which received awards in Sydney and Paris was scattered to the wind. Likewise, one of Aesi’s most famous oil paintings, The Pilgrim of Art, which was stored in a three-sided shed in Sydney until it eventually deteriorated beyond repair. As all that now remains of the ‘poignant picture poesy’ which once depicted mother and daughter on their pilgrimage abroad, is a faded photograph of this work taken in the 1930s I have written WILD LOVE in a way that evokes both this lost work and the two women it once commemorated.
To check outextended chapter notes for Wild Love as well as its bibliography, acknowledgments, glossary, and an extensive gallery of additional images, please see the book’s Supplementary Materials.
In 2021, I presented some reflections on Adelaide Ironside and my writing process to the Royal Australian Historical Society:
WILD LOVE is part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award (ARC DECRA DE180100379) which involved reflecting upon the relationship between historical craft and speculative biography in academic writing. The following papers therefore will therefore provide interested readers will deeper insight into my processes and what I now refer to as my ‘speculative method’.
Aesi’s studies of shells and an egg, drawn for John Ruskin, SL NSW ML
In 2018 I wrote an article for TEXT entitled ‘Deliberate Freedom’ reflecting upon the opportunities of engaging with archival overlaps as well as ‘gaps’ when using ‘informed imagination’ to write Aesi’s speculative biography. The quote ‘Deliberate Freedom’ comes from a letter John Ruskin wrote to Aesi while providing her with private tutoring in 1865.
In 2019, I wrote ‘Stirring the Pot: speculating with fragments & informing the imagination’, for the Australian Women’s History Network, which provided me with an opportunity to investigate how sensory experiences of the past, can be used to navigate the gaps in the archival record.
In 2020, I wrote two articles for the European Journal of Life Writing (open-access), the first comparing the deaths of AESI and the Romantic poet John Keats, and the second taking another approach at writing AESI’s final days in Rome.
In 2021, I published the Public History Review article ”Remembering AESI’: Women’s History, Dialogical Memorials, and Sydney’s Statuary’, which explores the memory of AESI and other colonial women. I also co-edited a field-defining Routledge Collection entitled Speculative Biography: Experiments, Opportunities and Provocations, with literary scholar Donna Lee Brien.