Handfasted

Handfasted suggests that women's inequality is ultimately the result of constraints on women's sexuality, and that without the strict norms that govern women's sexual behaviour, women would be liberated in other domains.^[14] By eradicating the sexual double standards placed on women, handfasting has addressed other inequalities that women faced, including illegitimacy, spousal abandonment, marital unhappiness, and prostitution.^[15][16][17] The social structures that surround marriage in Columba also provide women with agency in choosing their spouses, contributing to women's economic freedom and allowing them to take on active roles in public life.^[18][19] Spence contrasts this with Liliard's experience outside of Columba, where she is forced to adapt to strict Victorian moral codes and initially feels constrained by societal expectations.^[9]

Handfasted is written as a work of speculative fiction about a potential alternative path of social development.^[20] Columba is presented as a utopia that is symbolically free of religious doctrines of original sin, allowing its residents to live according to a rationalist and utilitarian way of life.^[21][1] Spence suggests that Columba's social structures were also shaped by the influence of its "Founding Mother".^[22] However, the novel suggests that Columba's social development has not been without negative consequences, particularly its society's lack of interest in literature and the arts.^[21][23][24]

Handfasted also mirrors many of the topics of Spence's own social reform efforts, depicting the acceleration of her own efforts at improving women's and children's rights.^[25] Columba's girls are more educated than its boys, and "orphaned" children are given the greatest access to education.^[26] This serves as a reversal of the inequalities that Spence witnessed in her own society; Spence spent much of her life working to improve the lives of orphaned and institutionalised children, and was a campaigner for girls' education.^[27][28]

Like much of Spence's writing, Handfasted celebrates the Australian colony and concludes that it is in some sense the true utopia.^[12][10][24] Handfasted suggests that Columba's isolation has allowed for its radical social experimentation, and that its unique practices would not survive contact with the outside world.^[20][29] According to Thomson, the novel suggests that Australia provides a similar laboratory for humanist and rationalist social experimentation.^[30] The scholar Terra Walson Joseph agrees, arguing that Columba shows "both the limits and potentials" of the independent settler society; a society that has developed into something nearing a utopia, but that is trapped in stasis by its ability to open up to the outside world without sacrificing its uniqueness.^[31] She adds that Hugh and Liliard's journey is used to imply that settler colonies can serve as sites for rationalist social reform due to their separation from Britain, concluding that the novel "illustrates the degree to which utopian feminism itself was embedded in a settler colonial imaginary".^[32]

In her biography of Spence, Susan Magarey describes the novel as a "remarkable work". She writes that it has many similarities with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's later novel Herland, often regarded as the founding work of feminist speculative fiction.^[33] Both Magarey and the novel's editor Susan Thomson describe the third book of Handfasted—the diaries of Marguerite Keith—as particularly powerful and moving.^[2][34] Thomson writes that the diaries provide "a timeless portrait of woman's lot", depicting the struggles and personal tragedies that Keith endured before becoming Columba's matriarch.^[35]

Reviewing the book in The Age upon its release, Helen Daniel wrote that its publication was an "important literary event". She remarked that while the plot was at times thin, the novel had both historical and literary appeal, and that Spence's vision of feminist utopia was "intriguing" and relevant to modern feminists.^[24] Myfanwy Gollan similarly remarked in a review of the book in The Sydney Morning Herald that while its first half served more as a historical record of the ideals of 19th-century social reformers, the narrative of the second half would appeal to modern readers.^[13] A review of the book in The Sydney Morning Herald by L. V. Kepert described its love affair as "charming" and wrote that the story featured moments of suspense and quiet humour.^[23] In a review of the book for The Observer, Anthony Thwaite wrote that the novel had a tendency to drag on at times, but that it served as a "notable addition to utopian literature" and had similar features to later works by William Morris and Edward Bellamy.^[36]