The art and artifice of publishing Australian women's letter collections: 1950 to the present day

This thesis examines a series of commercial and editorial imperatives at work in the publishing of Australian women's letter collections from the 1950s to the present day. My key research questions investigate why and how Australian women's letter collections are published, and how the competing interests of personal privacy and public interest align with the pragmatics of publishing to shape the final collections. I locate my research within the chosen timeframe because it covers the mid-twentieth-century establishment of a local publishing industry in Australia, through to the current impacts of global and digital publishing today, when the art of letter writing is in decline. My research is underpinned by my own experience as an epistolary editor and by interviews with publishers, editors, literary agents and authors. It is the publishers' perspective, and how this directs the editing, production and marketing of women's letter collections, that informs my approach.