Democracy of Difference: Mary Austin, Joseph Conrad, and Global Feminism

Abstract

Mary Hunter Austin (1868–1934) was one of the earliest, most longstanding, and trenchant of Conrad's American readers in the first part of the twentieth century. In a series of prominent essays that played a powerful role in Conrad's American cultural promotion during the 1910s and 1920s, Austin galvanized Conrad for women and feminist readers by arguing that his works presented a conception of masculinity not reducible to conventional gender formulas. Working from feminist premises, Austin offered a vision of Conrad emphasizing the importance of recognizing and respecting difference. This vision comes to carry large gendered, ethnic, international, economic, environmental, and, above all, deliberative democratic implications. In recovering this lost reception history, this essay argues that Austin's feminist and transnational (American) lens offers an enhanced sense of the meaning of Conrad's work, just as the latter, in turn, offers a means of reevaluating the vast conceptual scope and political vision that animated Austin's own diverse corpus of writing.