The personalities of all five differed radically, but none of them found it easy. Gwen Harwood's particular struggle is told in convincing and well-researched detail by Ann-Marie Priest in the recently-released biography, My Tongue is My Own (La Trobe University Press, $37.99). Though Harwood's work had been appearing (sometimes under pseudonyms) in major Australian periodicals in the 1950s, it was not until 1963 that her first volume, Poems, was issued by Angus & Robertson, the dominant publisher of the period.

As Priest makes clear in her opening chapter, Harwood's childhood and adolescence in Mitchelton and then in the Brisbane suburb of Auchenflower were relatively idyllic, if occasionally straitened in the early days. It was a highly musical and social family, and Gwen Foster, as she was then known, learned the piano from the age of 10, soon appearing to be ready for a professional career on the instrument.

Her education at Brisbane Girls' Grammar School went smoothly, though not without occasional rebellions. Gwen was particularly influenced by the art teacher there, Vera Cottew, who later became a friend to whom she was deeply attached. Gwen, at this time, had a romantic attitude towards poetry as a form, but it was music and art she was first obsessed by.

A key event in Harwood's development is well-described by Priest when the 17 year-old Gwen is pressured to play for the famous visiting pianist, Artur Rubinstein, who (as she famously wrote in her poem, "Suburban Sonnet") "yawned".

By 18, Gwen was the student and mistress of her teacher (and, later, employer) Bob Dalley-Scarlett, though she successfully kept the latter detail a secret till her 70s. Priest's account of Harwood's reaction to Bob's "wandering eyes and hands" is typical of this biographer's honest and balanced approach more generally: "Gwen's attitude to such behaviour, for much her life, ranged from good-humoured tolerance to high-spirited encouragement".

A no-less-important, and overlapping, development was Gwen's attraction to the congregation at All Saints Anglican church where she played the organ. At one point, for several months, to the displeasure of her parents, she entered its associated Anglican convent as a "postulate". It was round this time, too, that she met Tony Riddell and Peter Bennie, both of whom were to be influential: Tony as a lifelong correspondent and Peter as an infatuation she never quite gave up on.

It was in this wartime-Brisbane milieu and still in her early 20s that Gwen Foster met Bill Harwood, who was to become her initially much-loved and ultimately very problematic husband in a marriage that lasted until Gwen's death in 1995. As Priest makes clear, they were both highly intelligent people - but not intelligent enough, it seems, to predict how unsuited they were.

By this time Gwen had, at least temporarily, abandoned her musical ambitions, taken a course in shorthand and typing, and gained a (very boring) job at the War Damage Commission. Bill, "a tall, shy brilliant man", according to Priest, was a naval friend of Tony's. "Once again," as Priest notes unpretentiously, "Gwen fell head over heels in love".

Even before they married, however, in August 1945, Bill had insisted she give up her correspondence with Tony Riddell (though she resumed it later). Within a few weeks of the marriage, Bill had obtained a position lecturing in English at the University of Tasmania and Gwen, as Priest puts it: "boarded a plane for the south. She would never live in Brisbane again."

Although she would raise her four children in that state and acquire several very important friends there, Gwen endured a life-long sense of exile. In her after-death instructions she specified that "not one ash is to remain in this melancholy island". This is the background to Gwen's struggle in the 1950s, to both satisfy the husband and children who depended on her and to do justice to her calling.

Although she had poems accepted quite often by major publications such as Southerly and Meanjin, she also had knock-backs. Gwen suspected, sometimes correctly, that this was due to her being dismissed as a "Tasmanian housewife", and successfully responded by using several pseudonyms, most of which were male and more often accepted.

Unfortunately, the stratagem climaxed (or misfired) with the notorious episode in which Gwen submitted to the Bulletin, under the pseudonym, Walter Lehmann, a pair of sonnets entitled "Eloisa to Abelard" and "Abelard to Eloisa", in which the capitalised first letters of her 28 lines (read downwards) declared "F***ALLEDITORSSOLONGBULLETIN". It was all somewhat confusing and helped give Harwood at once a much larger profile - and a reputation as a trickster.

Throughout the next three decades, she went on to publish five books with Angus & Robertson, all of which confirmed her central position among her luminous contemporaries, both male and female. They also confirmed her highly individual voice. As her children matured and left home, the situation simplified, but Harwood, ever one for engagement and being social, took up other responsibilities, in the writing community and elsewhere, which continued to exert pressure.

In her last years, Harwood was able to travel a bit more and accept offers to read and speak. Unfortunately, she was never able to travel outside Australia and continued to find Hobart burdensome, despite the support of a few crucial friends.

Although Gwen in her way remained loyal to her husband Bill, Priest also gives details of at least three affairs - one short-lived but highly romantic, a second short-lived and desultory and a third more extended but intermittent. From Priest's account, it seems that all three lovers were not particularly deserving of the affections Gwen lavished on them.

It's important to note, however, that her husband Bill was still very much with her when she died from cancer, aged 75. Priest's understated account of this, after some 379 pages of close biographical detail, is affecting:

The hospital called (Bill)and he came back by taxi at 1 a.m. He told Rosemary later (a close mutual friend) that (Gwen) had tried to talk to him but couldn't make herself understood ... He sat by her, holding her hand, and they both drifted off. When he woke at 3 a.m., she was gone.

As if to point out that the main thing about poets is their poetry, not their life, her son, John Harwood, himself a writer, has edited, with the same publisher, The Best 100 Poems of Gwen Harwood (edited by John Harwood, Black Inc, $22.99). Nearly all the key poems are here but, understandably, the Bulletin sonnets are not.

Both books are essential reading for anyone interested in Australian poetry and/or the situation endured by creative women before our allegedly more enlightened times.