M. Barnard Eldershaw

M. Barnard Eldershaw was the pseudonym used by the twentieth-century Australian literary collaborators Marjorie Barnard (1897–1987) and Flora Eldershaw (1897–1956). In a collaboration that lasted two decades from the late 1920s to the late 1940s, they published 5 novels, 3 histories, a radio drama, a collection of short stories, and several collections of critical essays and lectures.

Flora Eldershaw and Marjorie Barnard were active in the Australian literary scene of the 1930s and 1940s. 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".

Marjorie Barnard met Flora Eldershaw, who was a year ahead of her, in her first year at the University of Sydney. Marjorie Barnard wrote of their first meeting as being

[N]ot entirely happy. I was the greenest of green 'freshers'. Flora was established in her second year. Chance had given me the locker immediately above hers. Its untidy contents frequently spilled out into her more ordered domain. My then meager person was continually underfoot, and Flora's brown eyes flashed with indignation more often than they smiled. But within the year we were close friends. She widened my horizons and quickened my mind. Later this friendship was to withstand what everyone agrees to be the acid test of collaboration in writing.

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. Dale Spender writes that

"with so little encouragement, opportunity - or inclination, given the demands of the day - she [Marjorie Barnard] and Flora Eldershaw ... still managed to write their classic Australian novel A House is Built (1929), and another, Green Memory (1933)".

However, in 1936, when they were both thirty-nine, Barnard and Eldershaw also took a flat in Potts Point providing them with space for independence. Here, they held regular gatherings which operated something like a literary salon. Many of the leading literary and cultural figures of the time visited the flat. These included Frank Dalby Davison, Xavier Herbert, Leslie Rees, Tom Inglis Moore, Miles Franklin, Vance Palmer and Kylie Tennant.

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