Through their lectures and reviews and their active participation in the Fellowship of Australian Writers, they played an important role in the development of Australia's "literary infrastructure".
[2] While Marjorie Barnard spent most of the 1920s to 1940s living at home with her parents, Flora Eldershaw resided at the schools where she taught.
These included Frank Dalby Davison, Xavier Herbert, Leslie Rees, Tom Inglis Moore, Miles Franklin, Vance Palmer and Kylie Tennant.
Guests included peace activists such as Lewis Rodd and Lloyd Ross, and Frank Dalby Davison said that his pamphlet "While freedom lives" grew out of "social discussions at the M. Barnard Eldershaw salon".
Barnard and Eldershaw were not part of the Bohemian circle as practised, for example, by Norman Lindsay, but this was not due to "petty bourgeois morality".
[4] Rather, it was because of "their expressed desire to promote the local literary product and force recognition of it from the prevailing cultural establishment".
[12] It is an historical novel set in the nineteenth century, and focuses on the restricted lives of middle-class women of the era.
Goldsworthy suggests that through this approach they also reflected "the dilemma of middle-class women in their own time, still largely denied the right to work and independence".
A report on a 1931 meeting of the Canberra Society of Arts and Literature describes a lecture by Kenneth Binns on Green Memory in which he says the book "not only delights but ... also adds dignity and significance to Australian letters".
[15] He praises the characterisation of both the main and secondary characters, and describes Barnard and Eldershaw as "masters of vivid, picturesque yet dignified writing".
[18] Spender argues that it stands "firmly in the tradition" of women writers like Aphra Behn, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Elizabeth Gaskell who "have utilised fiction as a means of urging society to create a better world".
This is despite significant evidence to the contrary, including Barnard's asking Palmer to obtain Eldershaw's signature as well as her own for his copy.
[22] Maryanne Dever argues that there is significant evidence for Eldershaw's active involvement in the novel, including correspondence from the publisher referring to them both, and Eldershaw's later letter to Miles Franklin in which she commented on "the awful effort of having to close up the gaps left by the censor and adapting the ending".