Testing does the DATE include happen?
When Jean saw Hal Devanny, a "strikingly handsome man" she felt "the miracle of love at first sight". She married him, "a hewer at the coal face", rejecting her fiance, a senior engineer at Puponga mine in New Zealand. Thus Ferrier introduces Jean's "incorrigible romanticism"(p.17). Jean became a writer about romance and desire, as well as her other passion - class struggle and communist politics, the romance of hope for the future.
"The upheaval of 1908-1913 .. was decisive in the making of New Zealand's working class" (p.19) and in Jean's early political education. From 1911 - 1929 in New Zealand Jean and Hal were active unionists, part of a Marxist Study Circle, and Jean discussed with Marxists, socialists, IWW supporters, invariably men, raising doubts about her decency among "the wives" (p. 19).
By the time the Devanny's migrated to Australia in 1929, one of Jean's 3 children had died, Jean had published 3 novels and a book of short stories, and had contacts on the left to follow up. "Sydney 1929 was a hotbed of bitter industrial disputes" (p. 53) Jean joined the Communist Party of Australia in1930. She went on to be furiously active in various party front groups such Militant Women's Movement, Workers International Relief (WIR), and was a hugely successful paper-seller and a charismatic public speaker on the Sunday open platform in the Domain. She also played a leading role in organising leftwing groups for artists and writers such as the Writers Association.
She went to Berlin and Moscow in 1931, met Klara Zetkin, and Solomon Lozovsky, President of the Red International of Labour Unions, had her portrait drawn by Kathe Kollwitz , and spoke to the point of exhaustion for the Friends of the Soviet Union on her return.
State repression included a ban on the import of radical publications since 1921 (making Marxist texts scarce), extensive arresting of protestors in the 30s, and avid police surveillance (which provided much of the evidence of Jean's activities for the book) throughout the 30s, 40s, 50s and even a few month's before Jean's death on International Women's Day in 1962. The CPA leadership went underground in the 30s. In 1940 while the USSR had a peace pact with Hitler, the CPA's publications were made illegal.
The sexual puritanism which had obstructed the publication of Jean's books in the 20s and 30s, was compounded by the anti-communist climate in the 40s and 50s. Even publishers with Party connections or left sympathies were unhelpful in the 50s.
Jean's relationships with the men who lead the Party were ambivalent. Despite her obvious talents and energy, and her leading agitational role, especially in the WIR, she was never considered for a position in the leading bodies of the party. Her class status, as a writer, not a proletarian, and her openness about sexual matters, placed a question mark over her reliability to follow the party line. She argued her point of view, regardless of the line of the time, over the role of artists and writers, ("Art is a weapon") and the needs of women, especially in terms of sexual relationships, birth control and abortion. She was also an early advocate of indigenous rights, first of Maoris in New Zealand, then of Australian Aborigines.
It was during the 1930s that Devanny made the first of many long visits to North Queensland, where she finally lived and died. North Queensland provided much material for her writing, and it was while here that she felt most torn between being in Sydney at the centre of Communist politics, and in a tropical environment which gave her great pleasure and space to write. It was also here that the most shocking episode of the book occurred in 1941. Coming into conflict with a group of CP men, about how they treated their wives, and with some of their wives for being unconventional, Jean was pack raped. Mateship proved thicker than comradeship or a sense of justice. The men made allegations of "depravity" against Jean to Party leaders, and she was expelled without being allowed to defend herself, let alone seek action against her attackers. It took till 1945 for her to gain readmission to the Party.
Many questions are implicit in Ferrier's book, but Ferrier holds back from asking many of them explicitly within Jean's story. In the Prologue and Afterword Ferrier elaborates her own interest in the relation between the personal, private and the political, public, between understanding social reality and the making of myth and illusion in history telling. One illustration of this is in the double-standard applied to Jean's sexual behaviour as compared to Party men. The men's sexual privacy was respected because standards allowed men to follow their desires. Jean, who did not accept the different standards imposed on women, and who advocated women's needs for birth control to support their sexual freedom, suffered scrutiny, disparagement and rape. No wonder then that there are moments of incongruous prudery in Jean's life as she sought to escape this.
Another big question. How did Devanny, sharp and energetic, standing up to Party leaders on issues nearest to her heart, weave her way through the 30s and 40s with no apparent need to challenge the ill-explained twists and turns of the Moscow line; from social-fascist social-democrats, to popular front with anyone anti-fascist; from supporting the Stalin-Hitler pact, to opposing strikes which might undermine the Allied War effort? At the level of her own united front work she wrote a criticism in 1932, but no broader challenge.
Since Ferrier's politics are anti-Stalinist, she has probably included everything she could find on this topic. Which means that there is almost nothing. Devanny's access to other analysis was limited. "Discussion was free and democratic except for one point. No one was allowed to say, Trotsky is Right! Berating Trotsky was a must." (p.110) Devanny stuck with the CPA, leaving in 1950 but rejoining in 1957. In 1961, Devanny, sick with leukaemia, learnt about some men shot trying to escape from East Berlin along the Berlin Wall. When a friend "remarked 'Fancy trying to escape from Heaven!' [Jean] burst out laughing" (p. 310). Devanny had heroically held onto her romantic hope for the future, unlike thousands who had given up. But the political basis for that hope had deteriorated to tragicomedy.
Ferrier has shown great restraint in filling her book with details and voices from Jean's life, with little comment of her own. She must have edited hundreds of thousands of words, including police surveillance reports. The result is a succinct document which paints a detailed picture, all too briefly reviewed here, of what it took to be a sincere (if misguided) Marxist woman and writer, through events of enormous historical significance. Ferrier makes the evidence available to readers to construct our own arguments about what it all means.