Abstract

A quarter of a century after her death, controversial comment continues to surface regarding theAustralian writer, Eve Langley.[1] In addition to popular attention, half a dozen academic essays discussaspects and estimations of Langley's life and work, including 'becoming' Oscar Wilde and the attenuateissue of transvestism, her solitary later life and her death. Two full-length texts also exist which focus onthe writer and offer widely disparate answers to the question: who was Eve Langley? The earlier of thesetexts is The Importance of Being Eve Langley, an annotated biography by Joy L Thwaite. The morerecent is Lucy Frost's Wilde Eve; Eve Langley's Story-a selected, edited collection of Langley'spreviously unpublished writings. The latter could be generically classified as literary intervention.Because the texts and their apparent common focus form a series of temporal, spatial and culturalevents they are open to interpretation both theoretically and politically