Kay Glasson Taylor

Kay Glasson Taylor (8 July 1893 – 14 May 1998) was an Australian novelist.

Kay Glasson Taylor in 1930

Early life

Katherine "Kay" Glasson was born in Queensland. All of her grandparents were Cornish Australians; three of them were born in Bathurst, New South Wales. Her younger sister Deirdre Tregarthen was a poet. Kay Glasson attended medical school in Sydney.[1]

Career

Novels by Kay Glasson Taylor include Ginger for Pluck (published under the pseudonym "Daniel Hamline", for young readers, 1929); Pick and the Duffers (1930), called "an Australian Tom Sawyer" by more than one reviewer;[2][3] Wards of the Outer March (1932), set in "convict days in New South Wales", with a disabled Cornish central character;[4] and Bim (for young readers; serialized in 1946, published as a book in 1947).[5] Her fiction is still read as a representation of white Australian women's experiences of gender and race in the context of colonialism.[6][7]

Pick and the Duffers was adapted for an Australian film soon after publication.[8] It was awarded the second prize of £250 in The Bulletin's novel competition in 1930, beaten by Vance Palmer's The Passage.[9]

Personal life

Kay Glasson married Ronald Beresford Taylor in 1916.[10] They had three children (Dorothy, Ian, and Desmond) and lived at Murilla South, Surat, Queensland, on a ranch where they bred Shetland ponies.[11]

Kay Glasson Taylor was widowed in 1957, and died in 1998, aged 104 years. Her grave is in Brisbane General (Toowong) Cemetery.[12]

References
  1. "Queensland Novelist" The Telegraph (26 March 1930): 14. via Trove
  2. "An Australian Tom Sawyer" Weekly Times (24 January 1931): 2. via Trove
  3. "Pick and the Duffers" Western Champion (24 December 1930): 8. via Trove
  4. "In Those Bad Old Days" Weekly Times (28 January 1933): 26. via Trove
  5. Philip Nielsen, "Locating Queensland Children's Literature: Reef, Bush, and City" in Patrick Buckridge and Melinda McKay, eds., By the Book: A Literary History of Queensland (University of Queensland Press 2007): 289. ISBN 9780702234682
  6. Belinda McKay, "Writing from the Contact Zone: Fiction by Early Queensland Women" Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Liberation 30(2)(2004): 62.
  7. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (Aboriginal Studies Press 2004): 161. ISBN 9780855754655
  8. Yorick, "The Australian Bookman" Daily News (16 July 1932): 14. via Trove
  9. "The Week (Brisbane, Qld. : 1876 - 1934) - 21 Mar 1930 - p21". Trove. Retrieved 2020-07-26.
  10. "Taylor–Glasson" Brisbane Courier (26 December 1916): 7. via Trove
  11. "Writes of the Outback" Queensland Country Life (18 July 1940): 6. via Trove
  12. Ronald Beresford Taylor, Brisbane General (Toowong) Cemetery.
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