Katie Hansord's Colonial Australian Women Poets: Political Voice and Feminist Traditions is the first major study of the work of five of the most significant of the many women who wrote poems in Australia during the nineteenth century. There are many reasons why their poetry has been neglected until now. First, much of it was published in newspapers and magazines rather than in volumes and so has remained difficult to access until recent mass digitization of newspapers from the period. This was especially so with the two earliest poets discussed here, Eliza Hamilton Dunlop and Mary Bailey. Both had published poetry in Britain before arriving in Australia, with Bailey producing several volumes. But after following her husband to Van Diemen's Land when he was transported for forgery, she was unable to afford the cost of further volume publication, although she remained a prolific contributor to local newspapers. A manuscript collection of her poetry, ‘The Vase’, which Dunlop prepared in the hope that it would be published, is now in Sydney's Mitchell Library. She too, it seems, did not have enough money to pay for it to be published as a volume in either Australia or Britain. And any writer without a volume of prose or verse surviving in a library failed to be included in later anthologies, bibliographies and histories of Australian literature.

The three other women poets discussed by Katie Hansord did manage to publish a volume in either Australia or Britain, as described in the chapters dealing with their work. Caroline Leakey's Lyra Australis: Or Attempts to Sing in a Strange Land was published jointly in London and Hobart in 1854 when she had returned to England after five years in Tasmania. Emily Manning's The Balance of Pain and Other Poems (1877) was also published in London; she had visited England earlier and contributed to London journals and so presumably had contacts there in the publishing industry. By the time Louisa Lawson published her collection, The Lonely Crossing and Other Poems, in Sydney in 1905 she had established her own press and so was the only one of the five women to fully control the production of her work.