Mary Eliza Fullerton

Mary Eliza Fullerton Poems

Mary Eliza Fullerton Biography

Mary Eliza Fullerton (14 May 1868 - 23 February 1946) was an Australian writer. Fullerton was born in Glenmaggie, Victoria, was educated at home by her mother and at the local state school. After leaving school she stayed on her parents property, until she moved to Melbourne in her early twenties. She was active in the women's suffrage movement from the 1890s and early 1900s. During World War I she wrote articles on feminist issues and arguing against conscription for Victorian publications. She visited England in 1912 and moved there in 1922. She wrote stories, articles and verse for magazines and periodicals, sometimes under the pseudonym Alpenstock. She wrote three novels between 1921 and 1925 under her own name, but fearing prejudice against her as a woman without a university education, publication of her two last works in verse, Moles do so little with their privacy and The wonder and the apple, were published under the pseudonym E. Their publication was arranged by her friend Miles Franklin. Her identity as their author was revealed after her death.)

The Best Poem Of Mary Eliza Fullerton

The Selector’s Wife

The quick compunction cannot serve;
She saw the flash,
Ere he had bent with busy hand
And drooping lash.

She saw him mark for the first time,
With critic eye,
What five years’ heavy toil had done
’Neath roof and sky.

And always now so sensitive
Her poor heart is,
That moment will push in between
His kindest kiss.

The moment when he realised
Her girlhood done—
The truth her glass had long revealed
Of beauty gone.

Until some future gracious flash
Shall let each know
That that which drew and holds him yet
Shall never go.

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