Hearing Maud

What are the options for a little girl who loses most of her hearing in a remote farming community in the 1980s? In this hybrid memoir, Jessica White explores how she negotiated the myriad challenges presented by her deafness. Isolated in the country and with a lack of services, Jessica was raised as a hearing person but often felt out of place. She escaped into reading, which led to writing to express the pressures and frustrations of being a deaf person in a hearing world.

When she moved to London to study after being awarded a scholarship, Jessica was completely destabilised until she found a lifeline in her research on Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of nineteenth-century Queensland novelist Rosa Praed. Maud, who was taught to speak rather than sign although she had no hearing at all, suffered from the expectation that she be ‘normal’. As Jessica delved into the archives to unearth the details of Maud’s disability, she discovered a history that, she realised, was still impacting on deaf people such as herself. By tracing Maud’s voice in letters and journals over several years, Jessica discovered her own deaf self and voice.