Hearing Maud

This is an extraordinary and poignant memoir written in an embodied and attentive style. White offers us glimpses of global deaf history woven with the tapestry of her own life/story and accentuated with the lives of Rosa and Maud Praed. Hearing Maud is a literary seduction about literary seductions.

Brenda Jo Brueggemann
Lend MeYour Ear and Deaf Subjects

In her three-part soliloquy on her search for belonging, understanding and love, Jessica White achieves an extraordinarily accomplished fusion of personal memoir, biography and deaf studies. White’s searching ruminations about the implications of her lifelong deafness together with her scholarly research of Maud Praed – the deaf daughter of nineteenth- century Queensland expatriate novelist Rosa Praed – and dive into deaf studies resound with tension, drama and insight without yielding to sentiment or polemic. By navigating Maud’s heartbreaking story of being deaf in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,White locates her own personal Australian experiences of growing up deaf within the panorama of deaf history. In doing so, she not only arrives at an enriched understanding of her deaf self, but also provides a uniquely Australian contribution to the literature of, about and by deaf people.

Donna McDonald
The Art of Being Deaf: A Memoir and Jack’s Story

In Hearing Maud Jessica White fulfils, with grace, elegance and a fierce regard for truth-telling, writing’s primary task: to tell it as it is; but as no one has ever told it before. This is a book of wonder. It gives voice to silence.

Martin Edmond
Battarbee and Namatjira and Isinglass