Beyond tropes: Why Eve Langley’s legacy must be understood through a trans inclusive lens

Sam Elkin

The sad tale of Eve Langley, author of the 1942 picaresque classic The Pea Pickers, has transfixed readers for generations.

The Pea Pickers, a fictionalised autobiography, tells the story of Steve and Blue, two gender non-conforming sisters who don men’s attire to work as agricultural labourers outside Bairnsdale in Gippsland during the Great Depression.

The book, long accepted as an Australian classic (albeit one marred by racism), perhaps captivates readers today less than the sad, complex story of Langley themselves. Soon after the publication of The Pea Pickers, Langley was sent to a mental asylum in Auckland as a ‘mentally defective person’ by their husband, where they remained for seven years, separated from their three children, the inventively named Bisi Arilev, Langley Raviley, and Karl Marx.

When Langley was released, they returned to Australia, living a life of poverty and estrangement. In 1954, Langley legally changed their name to Oscar Wilde. Their identity as Wilde was increasingly central to their self-conception, their one other published novel, White Topee, a sequel of sorts to The Pea Pickers, culminates in the protagonist being reborn as Oscar Wilde. Despite writing compulsively, none of Langley’s other manuscripts were accepted for publication. They went on a disastrous trip to Greece and died alone in a ramshackle hut in the Blue Mountains in 1974.

Langley’s life, letters and largely unpublished oeuvre have been revisited by many over the years from the perspective of race, class and settler colonial identity. The transgender themes in The Pea Pickers, from the siblings cross-dressing to Eve’s adoption of the fictional moniker Steve Hart, one of the Ned Kelly gang who was known to masquerade as a woman, has fascinated many. Steve’s transgressive desire to embody masculinity is made explicit by Langley from the outset:

“I knew that I was a woman, but I thought I should have been a man; I knew that I was comical but I thought I was serious and beautiful, as well. It was tragic to be only a comical woman when I longed above all things to be a serious and handsome man” (Langley 5).

To a contemporary reader, this account will sound like someone who might today be described as transgender. How each generation has responded to the transgender themes in Langley’s work reveals as much about prevailing attitudes to gender nonconformity as it does about Langley themselves.

In the 1980s, as Langley’s work was reclaimed within feminist efforts to recover lost women’s voices, the dominant interpretation cast Langley’s desires as a tragic response to the devaluation of women—a misguided parody of masculinity. Marian Arkin, in her 1981 essay “Literary Transvestism in Eve Langley’s” The Pea Pickers, wrote:

“Eve’s attitude toward sexual identity is, like the transvestite’s, warped. She denies her femininity by distorting both male and female roles, ultimately making them grotesque of what they really are.” (110)

Similarly, Joy L. Thwaite’s 1989 biography The Importance of Being Eve Langley described Langley as a woman “reacting violently against the acceptable feminine stereotype whose future lay in marriage and childbearing,” but whose “dangerous pose of pseudo‑masculinity” was ultimately a failed attempt at self‑definition” (41).

In Elizabeth McMahon’s 1996 essay “Oscar Wilde in Eve Langley’s White Topee: The Transvestic Origins of the Australian Self Made man”, she offers a post-modern account of Langley’s work, contending that the climax of Steve’s transformation into Oscar Wilde in White Topee is not a window into their own gender identity or troubled mental health, but a profound intervention into Australian literary myth-making, problematising the concept of the colonial self-made man.

The most recent re-examination of Eve Langley’s life and legacy is Helen Vine’s 2021 Eve Langley and The Pea Pickers. This biography aims to utilise previously unexamined letters as well as the text of Langley’s published and unpublished novels to piece together the ‘truth’ of why Langley experienced poor mental health and was drawn to themes of gender non-conformity. Much of the book is a fascinating account of Langley’s life and valuable summaries of Langley’s unpublished novels.

However, Vine enters troubling territory when she attempts to locate the origins of Langley’s gender variance and mental distress in their family history. Vine cites the negative portrayal of the absent father in The Pea Pickers as evidence that Langley and possibly their sister June were abused by their father.  Later, she interprets a moment in White Topee in which Steve envisions their parents as “Lady Wilde, and some Princess”, the latter wearing a “green linen driving skirt,” as proof that Langley’s father was “a cross‑dresser” (203).

Vine’s concluding chapter offers further “evidence”: a pencil drawing that Langley made shortly before their death in 1974 of a male figure in underpants named “Apollo” and a child named “Dolly”, posed near a doll and a book. An unnamed child clinical psychologist interprets the drawing as “typical of an individual who had been abused,” and further suggests that the male figure’s clothing “obscured his gender,” indicating he “may be a cross‑dresser.” Vine concludes that “all of the outstanding issues about books, gender identity and abuse come together in this one extraordinary drawing” (295).

This literary detective work is highly speculative—and it brushes dangerously close to harmful tropes about transgender identity.

There is no doubt Langley lived with a significant mental health condition. But the possibility that they also experienced gender dysphoria is not inherently linked to that condition. While the 1980 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) included “transsexualism” as a diagnosable disorder, this has been removed from the current DSM‑5, which explicitly states that gender nonconformity is not a mental illness.

Implying that Langley’s difficulties stemmed from having a cross‑dressing father, especially when there is little evidence for this claim, is harmful to trans people. It reinforces the false association between trans parents, particularly trans women, and abuse or harm, an association that has long been used to stigmatise and endanger them. Furthermore, using a hidden “man in a dress” as the climactic twist in Vine’s narrative reproduces the same transphobic trope that underpins notorious films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Dressed to Kill (1980). Given the unacceptably high rates of mental distress and suicidality within the trans community, exacerbated by the politicisation of gender‑affirming healthcare, contested access to single‑sex spaces, and escalating targeted attacks from far‑right and other bad‑faith actors, it is vital that we move away from these unhelpful stereotypes.

Disappointingly, this supposed “gender reveal” about Langley’s father was uncritically replicated in the ABC’s 2021 audio production Finding Eve Langley, writing a life which uses Vines’s book as a primary source.

While there is much to be gained from revisiting Eve Langley’s life and literature, future work must do so through a trans‑inclusive, trauma‑informed lens, one that resists harmful tropes and recognises the complexity of gendered experience rather than reinscribing outdated assumptions.

---

Works Cited

Arkin, Marian. “Literary Transvestism in Eve Langley’s The Pea Pickers”. Modern Fiction Studies, vol.27, no.1, 1981, pp. 109–116.

Langley, Eve. The Pea Pickers. Angus & Robertson, 1942.

McMahon, Elizabeth. “Oscar Wilde in Eve Langley’s White Topee: The Transvestic Origins of the Australian Self Made Man”. Southerly, vol. 56, no. 3, The English Association Sydney, 1996, pp. 102–114.

Thwaite, John L. The importance of being Eve Langley. Angus & Robertson, 1989.

Vine, Helen. Eve Langley and The Pea Pickers. Monash University Press, 2022.

About the author