Living History: Essays on History as Biography
Edited by Susan Magarey and Kerrie Round

Year of publication: 2005
ISBN: 0958596298

RRP: $AUS 30.00

Living history tells the stories of people's lives. That is what this book does, in a collection of studies extending from the Middle Ages to the present and from Britain and Europe to the backblocks of Australia.

They introduce you to an array of people, both extraordinary and ordinary, showing each in their times and in the relationships that sustained and constrained them.

Here we meet German Herman Joseph, whose twelfth-century epilepsy helped him become a saint. Here we meet an entirely new view of early seventeenth-century English royalty, because it is focussed on the ladies-in-waiting and their connections. Here we meet the eighteenth-century English jurist, William Blackstone, and at the same time the twenty-first historian, Wilfrid Prest, writing about both at once.

In Australia, coloniser and colonised appear in the relatively gentle endeavours of Angus Maclaine, and in the genocidal actions and fantasies of police constable, William Willshire. We encounter the novelist, Catherine Martin, composing her own life as she writes her novels, and poet, C.J. Dennis, also constructing a life, though in a different manner. Artist, Nora Heysen, had to escape the shadow cast by the immense talent of her father to achieve a life and career of her own. Roma Mitchell, the great and good, opening new fields of endeavour for women as she fashioned her own life, remains yet a shadowy figure, unknowable, despite her glittering career.

Collected together, these people enlarge our understanding of ourselves and each other in our own times.