The Literature Fund of the Australia Council recently granted $20,000 to Penguin Books to fund 'intensive one-to-one professional support' from freelance editors for ten newly emerging writers. It seems that important developmental editorial work - once a core publishing activity - can now only be provided by publishing houses when it is subsidised by the federal government. In an era of commodity publishing, the multinational conglomerates that dominate the Australian scene have sought to improve profit margins by cutting back on full-time editorial staff, so that in-house editing is now rare and proof-reading almost non-existent. In this world of skimping and outsourcing, neither emerging nor stablished writers have much prospect of building a long-term professional relationship with company staff. Jacqueline Kent's biography of Beatrice Davis (1909 - 1992), one of Australia's foremost literary editors, takes readers into a world of writing, editing and publishing far removed from today's market-driven imperatives. While those working within the publishing industry have long recognised the influence and legacy of Beatrice Davis, Kent's biography will do much to consolidate wider understanding of her impact on generations of Australian writers.

After completing her BA at the University of Sydney and serving an editorial apprenticeship on the Medical Journal of Australia, Davis joined Angus and Robertson in 1937. Working first as a proof-reader and sales assistant, she was soon after appointed as Angus & Robertson's first full-time in-house book editor. Kent's account of Davis' subsequent career is a story of change, not only for Davis personally, but for Australian publishing: her story is inextricably entwined with that of Angus & Robertson, and the rise and subsequent decline of what was once Australia's leading publishing house. In this way, Kent's study joins important works like A History of the Book in Australia 1891-1945 (UQP 2001) edited by Martyn Lyons and John Arnold in making a welcome contribution to our understanding of the history of publishing and book production in Australia.

Although the greater part of her work at Angus & Robertson involved editing non-fiction works like The Australian Blood Horse, it is to the literary side of Davis' professional life that Kent pays greatest attention. As general editor at Angus & Robertson from the late 1930s through to the early 1970s, Davis played a formidable role in the fostering of Australian literary talent across those decades. A Certain Style is structured largely around Davis' relationships with prominent Australian writers such as Eve Langley, Ernestine Hill, Xavier Herbert, Hal Porter, Ruth Park and Darcy Niland. Drawing heavily on archival sources, Kent teases out the often intense and complicated working relationships that Davis developed with these figures. A prolific letter writer, she was extraordinarily diligent in keeping up communication with her authors, encouraging, cajoling, hectoring, and admonishing them by turns. Through her letters to different writers we gain a sense of her capacity to bolster inexperienced young authors, to deliver measured criticism to those who sought her professional opinion, and to balance firmness with flirtation. Some like Niland and Park found in Davis a mentor whose judgement was critical to their developing sense of themselves as professional writers as they struggled to earn a living. 'A bit of encouragement and advice from the right person', Park wrote to her, 'does so much to smooth out the rough places, of which we've had quite a few lately.'

Other relationships however, proved less straightforward. After discovering Eve Langley's The Pea Pickers among the entries for the 1941 S.H. Prior Memorial Prize and strongly advocating its publication by Angus & Robertson, Davis was then faced with Langley's lengthy disintegration and the delicate job of corresponding over many years with a troubled woman whose subsequent manuscripts - sometimes delivered in enormous batches - were not publishable then, even with the most sensitive editing.* A different order of difficulty existed in relation to authors such as Xavier Herbert and Hal Porter whose egos were only matched by their petulance and occasional perfidy. Davis exhibited enormous skill and patience in managing these authors who proved to be at once demanding, manipulative, sulking and bullying and who clearly never doubted for a moment that they should be accorded priority in their dealings with her or that, in addition to regular editorial duties, she would happily serve as selfless mentor, muse, mother, part-time analyst - and, according to some, occasional lover. The glimpses Kent offers into various writers' careers through their relationships with Davis will likely send many readers back to full-length biographies and memoirs to discover more. But what is communicated here is a measure of the often unacknowledged work that went into the making of Australian fiction in these years, particularly how individual works that now form part of the canon of Australian fiction were shaped through these intense and sometimes difficult exchanges between an individual author and an editor.

But no matter how clearly Davis' voice emerges from the fragments of correspondence quoted here, she nevertheless remains a somewhat enigmatic figure. Behind the well-honed professional persona, significant and interesting contradictions persist. Even while Davis was accorded considerable influence within her own department, men with less experience and talent were routinely granted greater status and influence within the firm and one is left wondering how she really felt about this. The same Davis who could be prissy and prim with respect to a novel's content, appears to have been anything but prim after a few whiskeys of an evening and rumours circulated as to the more colourful aspects of her private life. At times there is a slightly voyeuristic element to the attempts the biography makes to reconcile the professional woman and the private being and perhaps more attention might have been paid to drawing out the tensions Davis inevitably experienced in her endeavours to be taken seriously in an industry unused at that time to women, let alone a married woman, exercising relative power and autonomy in a world where considerable sanctions remained for women who stepped beyond the bounds of convention. The account of the final years of Davis' career in publishing is a poignant one. Her personal travails mirror shifts in the publishing industry itself from being a rather genteel profession with little concern for commercial imperatives to becoming a market-driven industry where books are simply products like any other. While Davis may have had some minor successes in battling with the changing ownership and management structures as Angus & Robertson moved into the 1970s, publishing as she knew it and her place in it had changed irrevocably. But it is the blending of a study of a single career with an effective mapping of the history of a firm and of an industry that is Kent's particular achievement in this book.

Maryanne Dever is Director of the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research at Monash University.

* For a full account of these, see Robyn Colwill's recently completed PhD thesis, 'Corridors of Memory, Passages of the Past: The Retrieval of Eve Langley', School of English, Media Studies and Art History, The University of Queensland, 2001.