Background
Marjorie Barnard was born in Ashfield, Sydney, to Ethel Frances and Oswald Holme Barnard, and was their only surviving child.
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1943
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1961
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1989
critic historian Librarian writer
Marjorie Barnard was born in Ashfield, Sydney, to Ethel Frances and Oswald Holme Barnard, and was their only surviving child.
Barnard had polio as a child and was taught by a governess until she was 10 years old. She then attended the Cambridge School and Sydney Girls High School. After high school, she went to the University of Sydney, from which she graduated with first-class honors and the first University Medal for History in 1918. She was offered a scholarship to Oxford, but her father refused her permission to go, and so she trained as a librarian at the Sydney Teacher's College. The University of Sydney conferred on her an Honorary Doctor of Literature in 1986.
Barnard began her career at the Public Library of New South Wales, where she topped library school examinations in 1921. Later she was transferred to Sydney Technical College, where she was librarian-in-charge from 1925. She pursued her writing at night. Her first book, short stories of childhood entitled The Ivory Gate, was published by Henry Champion in 1920.
In the late 1930s, Marjorie and Flora Eldershaw took a flat in Potts Point where they held regular gatherings which operated something like a literary salon. Since 1942 to 1950, she was a librarian at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization Library again. Barnard’s last major work, a commissioned biography of Miles Franklin, appeared in 1967.
Marjorie Barnard was a significant part of the literary scene in Australia between the wars and, for both her work as M. Barnard Eldershaw and in her own right, is recognised as a major figure in Australian letters.
Barnard and Eldershaw wrote their first collaborative novel, A House is Built, which went on to win the prize in 1928, shared with Katharine Susannah Prichard's Coonardoo.
Barnard's most successful fictional work written in her own right is The Persimmon Tree and Other Stories (1943). It was reissued by Virago in 1985, with the inclusion of three additional stories not previously published in book form.
In 1985 the Lane Cove Library created the Marjorie Barnard local studies room to acknowledge her association with the area.
Barnard regarded herself as a 'nineteenth century liberal and defined herself as a pacifist.
