It is often assumed that there was once a time when works of great literary merit could always be assured of finding a publisher. In those halcyon days, publishers cared as much about literary quality as they did about making money, and publishing was understood to be, at least in part, about service to literature. Today, however, a genius like Patrick White would starve in the streets before a publisher would take a chance on difficult works like his. This was the lesson drawn from the 2006 Wraith Picket hoax, when a journalist from the Australian submitted a chapter of White’s The Eye of the Storm to a selection of local publishers and literary agents under a pseudonym. Needless to say, it was rejected by them all. For Peter Craven this was evidence of ‘a quite hapless lack of expertise’ in the Australian publishing industry; our literary gatekeepers simply didn’t know good work when they saw it. Others felt that it revealed the cynicism of publishers and agents, who, as Hilary McPhee lamented, did not care about the quality of a book but only whether it would ‘sell well’.

It’s tempting to conclude that things were different in 1973, when The Eye of the Storm first appeared. In those days, publishers not only recognised good writing when they saw it but were also prepared to lose money on it, if necessary. But the reality is that by the 1970s White was already well known­—and as every publisher knows, there’s nothing like a name to sell a book. Would an unknown Patrick White have found it easy to place The Eye of the Storm? Numerous literary biographies show that finding a publisher willing to take on a demanding work of uncertain commercial potential has always been tricky. The publishing history of Christina Stead—whom White considered ‘a novelist of genius’—is  a case in point. Though her literary quality was recognised by publishers, reviewers and a handful of serious writers at every stage of her career, Stead always had trouble getting into print. When, in 1930, at the age of twenty-eight, she sent her first novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, out to publishers, she received nothing but rejections. After the first three, she wrote to her cousin Gwen that ‘The publishers have been very sensible, but they are afraid it would not sell, or sell enough to repay them.’ She added that ‘they say it has power but is not very easily read: that of course is something of a defect in a novel!’