'Crime fiction is often mistakenly held to be based on books and male detection. In fact, in the nineteenth century periodicals were a major mode of publication and from the mid-century on women inquirers played a recurring role in the developing genre, while most early male detectives were, by later standards, distinctly under-gendered. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal was a major early source; by the 1860s, female detectives were being created by male writers and in Bleak House (1852–53), Dickens gave Inspector Bucket’s wife distinct inquiring capacities. The major Australian author Mary Fortune – with more than four hundred stories in magazines over forty years from the 1860s – developed female inquirers over time. By the 1890s, professional English woman detectives were created, Loveday Brooke by C.L. Pirkis and Florence Cusack by L.T. Meade, while Baroness Orczy created as well as her best-selling ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ the leading police detective Lady Molly, like the others first appearing in magazines.'
Source: Abstract.
'Crime fiction started early in Australia, emerging out of the experiences of transportation and the convict system at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first Australian (that is, locally published) novel is generally agreed to be Quintus Servinton (1832), written by Henry Savery, a convicted forger who was transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1825 and—convicted once more of forging financial documents—died as a prisoner in Port Arthur in 1842. Quintus Servinton is a kind of semi-autobiographical fantasy that imagines its entrepreneurial protagonist’s redemption: surviving his conviction and jail sentence in order to return to England with his beloved wife. We can note here that it does four important things in terms of the future of crime narratives in Australia. Firstly, it presents colonial Australia as a place already defined by an apparatus of policing, legal systems and governance, where ‘justice’ can at least potentially work to restore an individual’s status and liberty: for example, through convict emancipation. Secondly, it insists that the experience of incarceration and punishment is crucial to that character’s reintegration into respectable life: ‘the stains that had marked him’, we are told, ‘were removed by the discipline he had been made to endure’ (Savery, vol. 3, ch. XIII, n.p.). Thirdly, the novel ties the colonial economy to financial investment and growth on the one hand, and fraud or forgery on the other. These apparent opposites are folded together at the moment of settlement to the extent that the phrase ‘forging the colonial economy’ is a kind of potent double entendre. Prominent transported forgers included the colonial artists Thomas Whatling (transported 1791), Joseph Lycett (transported 1814), Thomas Wainewright (transported 1837) and of course Henry Savery himself. In Savery’s novel, Quintus Servinton is ‘thunderstruck’ when someone explains the conventional distinction between legitimate financial deals and forgeries: ‘You surely do not mean, Sir, it can be a forgery, to issue paper bearing the names of persons who never existed….If that be the case…many commercial men innocently issue forgeries every day of their lives’ (vol. 1, ch. III, n.p.). This takes us to the fourth point: that crime fiction in Australia is also about imposture, where characters do indeed adopt ‘the names of persons who never existed’. The mutability of colonial characters—the question of how real (authentic) or fictional (fraudulent) they might be, and the impacts this has socially and fiscally on the colonial scene—soon becomes a tremendous problem for emergent systems of policing and governance in Australia. As Janet C. Myers notes, ‘the linkage between emigration and crime forged through convict transportation continued to evoke anxieties….The atmosphere in which such anxieties were nurtured was one of rapid social mobility and shifting identities in the Antipodes’ (2009, p. 83).' (Introduction)
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Author's abstract: Mary Helena Fortune wrote "The Detective's Album", the longest-running early detective serial, published for over 40 years in the Australian Journal. She was probably the first woman to write from the viewpoint of a police detective, and certainly the first to specialize in the nascent genre of crime fiction. Yet during her lifetime, and for decades afterwards, her identity was a mystery. This article will examine the sensational life and writing of Fortune. She was a hybrid colonial, born in Ireland, of Scottish ancestry, emigrating to Canada and then to Australia. Her crime writing was informed by bitter personal experience: on the lawless Australian goldfields; a bigamous marriage to a policeman; a son who spent over 20 years in jail. At times she was homeless, living in de facto relationships, and wanted by the police. Yet she was continually writing - her bibliography comprises over 500 items. The article will consider Fortune as an example of transgressive femininity, whose literary anonymity gave her both the freedom to write, and also protected her from the censorious gaze of the colonial Mrs Grundy. But she never progressed beyond colonial publication, despite producing one book, The Detective's Album (1871). Moreover, evidence exists that she was exploited and underpaid. Even during her lifetime it was commented that had she gone to England or America "where literary talent is properly appreciated", she would have become "a leading novelist". Few nineteenth-century crime writers had personal experience of their low-life subject matter. Even fewer female authors of the era could publicly assume the role of writer manqué. The irony with Fortune is that it is precisely this knowledge which both gave her the authority to write crime and sentenced her to anonymous literary drudgery. |
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This article revisits and revises some matters dealt within an article which appeared in the Australian Magazine Overland, no. 183, Winter, 2006.
(Source: Women's Writing online, Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group) |
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Author's abstract: Mary Helena Fortune wrote "The Detective's Album", the longest-running early detective serial, published for over 40 years in the Australian Journal. She was probably the first woman to write from the viewpoint of a police detective, and certainly the first to specialize in the nascent genre of crime fiction. Yet during her lifetime, and for decades afterwards, her identity was a mystery. This article will examine the sensational life and writing of Fortune. She was a hybrid colonial, born in Ireland, of Scottish ancestry, emigrating to Canada and then to Australia. Her crime writing was informed by bitter personal experience: on the lawless Australian goldfields; a bigamous marriage to a policeman; a son who spent over 20 years in jail. At times she was homeless, living in de facto relationships, and wanted by the police. Yet she was continually writing - her bibliography comprises over 500 items. The article will consider Fortune as an example of transgressive femininity, whose literary anonymity gave her both the freedom to write, and also protected her from the censorious gaze of the colonial Mrs Grundy. But she never progressed beyond colonial publication, despite producing one book, The Detective's Album (1871). Moreover, evidence exists that she was exploited and underpaid. Even during her lifetime it was commented that had she gone to England or America "where literary talent is properly appreciated", she would have become "a leading novelist". Few nineteenth-century crime writers had personal experience of their low-life subject matter. Even fewer female authors of the era could publicly assume the role of writer manqué. The irony with Fortune is that it is precisely this knowledge which both gave her the authority to write crime and sentenced her to anonymous literary drudgery. |
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This article revisits and revises some matters dealt within an article which appeared in the Australian Magazine Overland, no. 183, Winter, 2006.
(Source: Women's Writing online, Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group) |
'Crime fiction started early in Australia, emerging out of the experiences of transportation and the convict system at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first Australian (that is, locally published) novel is generally agreed to be Quintus Servinton (1832), written by Henry Savery, a convicted forger who was transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1825 and—convicted once more of forging financial documents—died as a prisoner in Port Arthur in 1842. Quintus Servinton is a kind of semi-autobiographical fantasy that imagines its entrepreneurial protagonist’s redemption: surviving his conviction and jail sentence in order to return to England with his beloved wife. We can note here that it does four important things in terms of the future of crime narratives in Australia. Firstly, it presents colonial Australia as a place already defined by an apparatus of policing, legal systems and governance, where ‘justice’ can at least potentially work to restore an individual’s status and liberty: for example, through convict emancipation. Secondly, it insists that the experience of incarceration and punishment is crucial to that character’s reintegration into respectable life: ‘the stains that had marked him’, we are told, ‘were removed by the discipline he had been made to endure’ (Savery, vol. 3, ch. XIII, n.p.). Thirdly, the novel ties the colonial economy to financial investment and growth on the one hand, and fraud or forgery on the other. These apparent opposites are folded together at the moment of settlement to the extent that the phrase ‘forging the colonial economy’ is a kind of potent double entendre. Prominent transported forgers included the colonial artists Thomas Whatling (transported 1791), Joseph Lycett (transported 1814), Thomas Wainewright (transported 1837) and of course Henry Savery himself. In Savery’s novel, Quintus Servinton is ‘thunderstruck’ when someone explains the conventional distinction between legitimate financial deals and forgeries: ‘You surely do not mean, Sir, it can be a forgery, to issue paper bearing the names of persons who never existed….If that be the case…many commercial men innocently issue forgeries every day of their lives’ (vol. 1, ch. III, n.p.). This takes us to the fourth point: that crime fiction in Australia is also about imposture, where characters do indeed adopt ‘the names of persons who never existed’. The mutability of colonial characters—the question of how real (authentic) or fictional (fraudulent) they might be, and the impacts this has socially and fiscally on the colonial scene—soon becomes a tremendous problem for emergent systems of policing and governance in Australia. As Janet C. Myers notes, ‘the linkage between emigration and crime forged through convict transportation continued to evoke anxieties….The atmosphere in which such anxieties were nurtured was one of rapid social mobility and shifting identities in the Antipodes’ (2009, p. 83).' (Introduction)
