Review: Eve Langley and The Pea Pickers by Helen Vines (Monash University Publishing) When your subject is a mid-century, gender-ambiguous author who lived under other names and wasn’t always honest about basic points of identification, writing a biography is a huge challenge. But Helen Vines’ Eve Langley and The Pea Pickers builds a substantial picture of this elusive author. Eve (left) and June Langley, 1920s. Courtesy of Monash University Publishing I first came to Langley’s work through her 1940 poem Native-Born as part of my research on dead kangaroos in Australian literature. Langley had been absent from my educational curriculum, dominated by her male contemporaries — Kenneth Slessor, Nevil Shute and the school-boy squabbles of the Ern Malley affair — and the more influential Patrick White and Randolph Stow. This wasn’t unusual in the 80s and 90s. Now, it is hard to justify any more than a sprinkling of them in an English course.