In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, the historian Dr Kiera Lindsey chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Wild Love: The Ambitions of Adelaide Ironside, the First Australian Artist to Astonish the World.
Wild Love
Born in Sydney in 1831, Adelaide Eliza Scott Ironside was the granddaughter of a convict forger and a First Fleet marine. She preferred to be known as Aesi, the first initial of each of her names. In Wild Love, Kiera Lindsey uncovers Adelaide’s life as an exuberant colonial painter, from her childhood on the shores of Sydney Harbour to the leading artistic circles of Europe where she was celebrated as ‘the impersonation of genius’.
Adelaide Ironside
Self Portrait, 1855
Pencil, wash and crayon on grey paper,
Newcastle Regional Art Gallery
Although Aesi grew up in colonial Sydney at a time when convicts still worked the streets and colonial lasses were expected to marry at sixteen, she longed to be an artist, not a wife; she had big ambitions. Aesi wanted to train with the best painters of her day in Europe, to elevate her sex, and to adorn her hometown of Sydney with republican frescoes.
Aesi’s Life in Colonial Sydney
In 1855, Aesi’s talent and ambition compelled her and her mother Martha to travel to Victorian London. Arriving in Italy in 1856, Aesi and Martha became swept up in the battle for Italian unification, as well as the fraught world of gossipy expatriate life presided over by the world’s then most famous poet couple, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning.
In Rome, Adelaide met a group of English and American women who sought personal and professional freedom in the city. Some called themselves the ‘sister painters’, and the Americans referred to themselves as ‘the jolly female Bachelors’.
Adelaide astonished Robert Browning with her ‘enthusiasm and wild ways’ and was mentored by the polymath and art historian John Ruskin. The Prince of Wales purchased her paintings, and she received accolades in Rome, London and Paris. Yet she struggled to earn enough income to support herself and her mother.
In this compelling biography, Kiera Lindsey reconstructs Adelaide’s remarkable life, from her early years in colonial Sydney to her studies in Europe and eventual rise to international acclaim. She shows how Adelaide challenged artistic boundaries by exploring themes such as identity, sexuality and spirituality and displayed a bold and expressive style, often employing innovative use of materials and techniques.
Several women in Adelaide’s life, particularly her mother Martha, supported her artistic ambitions and career. Kiera includes detailed accounts of these women and explores Adelaide’s relationship with Martha, adding a poignant layer to the story.
Kiera reveals the challenges and triumphs that shaped Adelaide’s artistic journey and celebrates her creative achievements, including as a republican poet. She also sheds light on the rebellious ideas of the Pre-Raphaelites and how they changed the course of Adelaide’s art and career.
Adelaide spoke French, Italian and German, and she read German philosophers. Influenced by both German and Scottish transcendentalism, she was enthusiastic about the invisible and spiritualism. Her poetry is highly mystical, and she viewed the world through an elevated, heightened sensibility.
Romantic mysticism infused Adelaide’s life and work. In Wild Love Kiera explores Adelaide’s intense ‘enthusiasm for the invisible’ and how this mysterious world of Victorian Spiritualism provided many nineteenth-century women with a degree of authority and self-expression often otherwise denied.
Tragically, Adelaide died of TB in Rome in 1867. A lengthy obituary was published in the Athenaeum, then the leading literary and artistic journal in the British world. The obituary was syndicated to 18 newspapers across the British Isles and was reprinted in Australian newspapers.
Several of Adelaide’s chalk, pencil and pastel sketches, oil paintings and portraits still exist, which is extraordinary given the haphazard way they were stored after her death. Her diary, which includes her poetry, also survived. So do 20 poems she published in Australia’s most radical newspaper of the time.
Retracing Adelaide Ironside’s Footsteps
Kiera Lindsey retraced Adelaide’s footsteps as the artist set upon her dream to become the first ‘Mistress of Art in the Southern Hemisphere’. Kiera trekked Sydney’s North Shore, caught vessels across Sydney Harbour, sought out the expertise of botanic illustrators, portraitists and oil painters, and walked about the parts of London where Adelaide and other sister painters struggled to be taken seriously by their Pre-Raphaelite peers.
Kiera then spent several months in Rome, where Aesi met the Prince of Wales and so charmed Pope Pius IX that she persuaded him to grant her permission to see Fra Angelico’s frescos in a monastery that explicitly excluded women. After visiting the Vatican’s Secret Archives, Kiera followed her heroine onto Florence to see its sumptuous works and stand in the green-walled parlour where Aesi once scried her crystal ball for the Brownings.
The Fallibility of Historical Sources
Through Kiera’s meticulous research and imaginative storytelling, we’ve gained a deeper understanding of Adelaide’s indomitable spirit, her artistic journey, and the societal challenges she overcame. Clearly, Adelaide’s contributions to the art world and Australia’s cultural history are significant and far-reaching. Her determination to break free from societal constraints and pursue her passion for art serves as an inspiration to us all.
The Sources, Subject and Story Drive the Narrative
Wild Love honours Adelaide’s memory and encourages us to recognise and celebrate the achievements of the courageous women who shaped our cultural heritage. By examining Adelaide’s life and work, Kiera offers readers a fresh perspective on Australian art history and challenges traditional notions of gender, sexuality and creativity.
Wild Love reinforces the crucial importance of rediscovering the women who played vital roles in shaping Australia’s cultural identity. Through Kiera’s exploration of Adelaide’s life and work, she restores the voice of a trailblazing artist whose ambitions were as bold as they were revolutionary.
Historical and Literary Truths
As an artistic genius who made a significant impact on the Australian and international art scenes during the nineteenth century, Adelaide’s achievements have long been overshadowed by more well-known male artists of the time. Wild Love helps to restore this imbalance and the marginalisation of female artists in Australia’s cultural history.
Despite Aesi’s hard-won fame, many of her works were lost or so badly neglected after her death that a celebrated collection of 40 watercolour Australian wildflowers that received awards in Sydney and Paris was scattered to the wind. Likewise, one of Aesi’s most famous oil paintings, The Pilgrim of Art, was stored in a three-sided shed in Sydney until it eventually deteriorated beyond repair.
All that remains of the ‘poignant picture poesy’ that once depicted mother and daughter on their pilgrimage abroad is a faded photograph of this work taken in the 1930s. Kiera crafted Wild Love in a way that evokes this lost work and the two women it once commemorated.
Praise for Wild Love: The Ambitions of Adelaide Ironside, the First Australian Artist to Astonish the World.
Kiera Lindsey has done it again! Meticulously researched, imaginatively written, and lavishly illustrated, Wild Love reconstructs with breathtaking vividness the passionate life of Adelaide Ironside and the rapidly changing world of which she was a part.
A spectacular achievement.
Professor Kevin A. Morrison, editor of Global Nineteenth-Century Studies
Kiera Lindsey’s Wild Love brings together both archival fragments and informed speculation to illuminate the life of Adelaide Ironside. No other method could allow a portraiture of this colonial-born Australian artist to be drawn in such detail.
Professor Melanie Nolan, Director, National Centre of Biography,
Australian National University
A magical book – spellbinding storytelling … breathtaking biography.
Professor Donna Lee Brien, co-editor Routledge, Literature and Food.
An enchanting story of a brilliant young woman who lived, and died, for her art.
Sue Williams, author of Elizabeth and Elizabeth.
In her confident flirtation with the historical record and biographical writing, Kiera Lindsey’s Wild Love recovers the exploits of the extraordinary artist Adelaide Ironside. This delightful book recounts the surprising experiences of women across generations, traversing the streets of colonial Sydney to the artistic salons of Rome in the pursuit of
creative freedoms.
Professor Kate Darian-Smith, University of Tasmania
This bold work of imagination and research is as startling as the wild paintings that made Ironside famous.
Dr William Pooley, Modern History, University of Bristol
An enchanting story of a brilliant young woman who lived, and died, for her art.
Sue Williams, author of Elizabeth and Elizabeth
Photographer: Ethan White.
About Kiera Lindsey
Kiera Lindsey is an historian and biographer whose fascination with the nineteenth- century world is fuelled by her imaginative curiosity for the colonial era and a desire for complex carefully crafted female characters. She specialises in developing imaginative but ethical ways of ‘re-presenting’ those who are under-represented in the historical record who might otherwise be rendered silent by sources made by men, for men.
Kiera’s first book, a speculative biography entitled The Convict’s Daughter (Allen & Unwin 2016), was the story of her great, great, great aunt, Mary Ann Gill, who became embroiled in a romantic scandal in 1848 when she attempted to elope with the Attorney General’s wayward son.
The Convict’s Daughter has been described as a ‘gloriously-unput-downable’, but ‘meticulously researched, broad sweeping book’ with a ‘rip-roaring narrative’ that ‘fearlessly cuts a new path between history and fiction’.
Kiera Lindsey’s Innovative Historical Research and Writing
In 2018, Kiera was awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award to investigate the relationship between historical craft and an emerging sub-genre of life writing known as ‘speculative biography’. She wrote an article for TEXT entitled ‘Deliberate Freedom’ reflecting upon the opportunities of engaging with archival overlaps as well as ‘gaps’ when using ‘informed imagination’ to write Aesi’s speculative biography. The quote ‘Deliberate Freedom’ comes from a letter John Ruskin wrote to Aesi while providing her with private tutoring in 1865.
In 2019, Kiera wrote ‘Stirring the Pot: speculating with fragments & informing the imagination’, for the Australian Women’s History Network, which provided her with an opportunity to investigate how sensory experiences of the past can be used to navigate the gaps in the archival record.
In 2020, Kiera wrote two articles for the European Journal of Life Writing (open-access), the first comparing the deaths of AESI and the Romantic poet John Keats, and the second taking another approach at writing AESI’s final days in Rome.
In 2021, she published the Public History Review article ‘Remembering AESI: Women’s History, Dialogical Memorials and Sydney’s Statuary’, which explores the memory of Aesi and other colonial women.
In addition to co-editing a Routledge collection on Speculative Biography in 2021, Kiera has published articles and book chapters about the methodological challenges and opportunities associated with using fictional techniques to retrieve slippery and shadowy figures from the archives. Both my critical and creative work has been described as cutting-edge and compelling.
Kiera’s second speculative biography Wild Love (Allen & Unwin, October 2023), ‘re-presents’ the life of the exuberant first Australian-born professional female artist, Adelaide Ironside (1831-1867).
In addition to volunteering for several history and biography organisations, Kiera Lindsey works at the History Trust of SA (HTSA) as South Australia’s History Advocate. In this role, she is the principal public spokesperson on South Australian history and ‘go to’ person for media and communities, championing history in all its forms, while also undertaking research and providing policy advice at state and federal level.
Kiera lives in Adelaide with her husband, Brye Marshall, a First Nation archaeologist, and their Red Heeler, Mungo Von Marshall. In her spare time, she loves to snorkel in the sea, ride her bike, go for road trips, and sniff about old museums and shops.
To learn more about Kiera Lindsey, you can find her here:
Wild Love Supplementary Materials
To check out extended chapter notes for Wild Love as well as its bibliography, acknowledgments, glossary and an extensive gallery of additional images, please see the book’s Supplementary Materials.