Boyd, Martin (1893-1972), was one of the most celebrated Australian novelists of the first half of the 1900’s. His work includes novels, poetry, travel writing, essays, and autobiographies. Many of his books focus on the life of European settlers in Victoria, Australia, at the end of the 1800’s and beginning of the 1900’s. He was a member of the second generation of the well-known Boyd family of artists from Melbourne, prominent in the arts in Australia throughout the 1900’s. See Boyd.
Boyd became famous for his family sagas, especially his novels The Montforts (1928, revised 1963), written under the pen name Martin Mills, and Lucinda Brayford (1946, revised 1954). These novels examine the cultural and social environment of early settlers in Victoria. The works describe the sense of dislocation felt by colonial families and the difficulties of adapting their European background to their new life in Australia. Many of the characters and events portrayed are drawn from Boyd’s own experience of growing up in Melbourne in the first years of the 1900’s. Boyd used recognizable figures from his own family as models for the characters in both The Montforts and Lucinda Brayford.
In his writings, Boyd created an image of Australia as a kind of innocent Eden, contrasting it with the attractions of Europe’s cultural sophistication and civilization. Boyd’s parents, Arthur Merric Boyd and Emma Minnie Boyd, both painters, had strong family and artistic links with Europe. Martin Boyd himself lived for much of his life in England, and later in Italy.
Boyd developed a writing technique that has been compared with Impressionism in painting, recording different “impressions” of a scene or event seen by a number of different characters (see Impressionism. In The Cardboard Crown (1952, revised 1964), the first book of the “Langton Quartet,” the main character pieces together his family’s past from written and verbal descriptions of events given by various members of the family. The other novels in the quartet are A Difficult Young Man (1955), Outbreak of Love (1957), and When Blackbirds Sing (1962).
Boyd wrote an autobiography, A Single Flame, in 1939. A memoir entitled Day of My Delight: An Anglo-Australian Memoir was published in 1965, and a travel essay, Much Else in Italy: A Subjective Travel Book, in 1958. His book of poetry, Retrospect, was published in 1920. For his novel Dearest Idol (1929), he used the pen name Walter Beckett.
Martin à Beckett Boyd was born on June 10, 1893, in Lucerne, Switzerland, while his parents were traveling in Europe. Boyd was raised in the artistic environment of his parents’ homes in and around Melbourne, notably at Sandringham, on Port Phillip Bay, and Yarra Glen. Boyd served in France during World War I (1914-1918) with an English regiment and with the Royal Flying Corps. He lived in England from 1921, joining an order of Franciscan monks in the Church of England for a short time about 1923. He started writing novels soon after leaving the order and bought a property near Cambridge. Boyd went back to Australia in 1948 but returned to England three years later because of ill health. He moved to Rome in 1957. He died on June 3, 1972.
