Friends and Rivals

'Deeply absorbing, fascinating and moving...now for the first time I have a sense of the women behind me...I loved the tone-detached and masterly but with a light touch, and a wit that's sharp but never cruel; and always sympathetically attuned to the strain of the women's attempts to find a balance between their inner and outer lives.' * Helen Garner *
'Few other writers have such an ability to understand and describe the relationships that create the characters of her subjects.' * Sydney Morning Herald *
'Brenda Niall is in a class of her own...Her books have all been works of insight and substance, their observations carefully considered.' * Michael McGirr, Age *
'Friends and Rivals goes beyond solitary portraiture and linear catalogue to place its subjects in their landscape...Rich and digressive, these portraits are open-seamed, their complex maps pointing towards other layers, other stories, named experience alongside the unnamed and the unnameable, elision and fiction jostling.' * Saturday Paper *
'[A] formidable combination of meticulous scholarship, reader-friendly lucidity, and ideas...about the nature of feminism, biography, and Australian literary and cultural history, and about the many places where those things intersect.' * Australian Book Review *
'Among living Australian biographers, only Philip Ayres matches Brenda Niall for painstaking research serving narratives at once spirited and judicious...Dr Niall ignores nothing.' * Spectator *
'An entertaining exploration of the overlapping lives of four of Australia's most admired women writers.' * Inside Story *
'Elegant, incisive and readable' * Australian *
'This joint biography uses previously hidden material, now in the hands of a more than gifted author who takes us on a literary journey to find out what we've been missing.' * Herald Sun *