The Drover’s Wife (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Henry Lawson
- First Published: 1894
- Type of Plot: Domestic realism
- Time of Work: About 1890
- Setting: The Australian Outback
- Principal Characters: The drover's wife, Tommy, Alligator
- Genres: Short fiction, Domestic realism
- Subjects: Nature, Rural or country life, Feminism, Isolation, Australia or Australians, Wildlife
- Locales: Australia
The Story
Like many stories by Henry Lawson (and like those of Anton Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield), “The Drover's Wife” has remarkably little action: The plot, such as it is, suggests the absence of action that characterizes life in the Outback (the dry, sparsely settled, and inhospitable areas distant from the few major urban settlements of Australia) during the long intervals between recurrent natural disasters, such as floods, bushfires, and droughts. This indicates a technical aspect that Lawson mastered in his short stories: the construction of a coherent fiction on...
[The entire page is 1552 words long]
