Hearing Maud, a Journey for a Voice is a most interesting hybrid: not quite a memoir, not quite a biography of a mother and her daughter, and not quite a survey of a pioneering Australian female author. It is not quite any of these things, but it is more than the sum of its parts. This is the blurb:

Hearing Maud: a Journey for a Voice is a work of creative non-fiction that details the author’s experiences of deafness after losing most of her hearing at age four. It charts how, as she grew up, she was estranged from people and turned to reading and writing for solace, eventually establishing a career as a writer.

Central to her narrative is the story of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th century Queensland expatriate novelist Rosa Praed. Although Maud was deaf from infancy, she was educated at a school which taught her to speak rather than sign, a mode difficult for someone with little hearing. The breakup of Maud’s family destabilised her mental health and at age twenty-eight she was admitted to an asylum, where she stayed until she died almost forty years later. It was through uncovering Maud’s story that the author began to understand her own experiences of deafness and how they contributed to her emotional landscape, relationships and career.

In the prologue, White explains the Greek concept of pharmakon, meaning that something can be both a poison and a cure. As a four-year-old, she contracted meningitis, and the antibiotics that saved her life, damaged the nerves of her cochlea, leaving her with limited hearing only in one ear. But, she says, deafness can also be a poison and a cure, and the way the pendulum swung in favour of one or the other depended on the time and the culture in which the deaf person lived. In this book White explores the contrast between the limited agency that 19th century Maud Praed had over her life, with her own. For White, deafness has led to being a writer: her insularity has made her an avid reader and an acute observer of people. Although there are difficulties and she questions some of the decisions her parents made on her behalf, she is independent, and she has a fulfilling life as an academic and a writer.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/08/01/hearing-maud-by-jessica-white/ ( )