The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.
Humorous account of a French duel in Paris in which Twain claimed to have acted as a second. He was the only party injured when his principal fell on him ... (PB)
Romance between a chambermaid and a coachman is broken by a pretty new housemaid. Narrated through the eyes of the small daughter of the house. Engaging; especially a fight between women involving a tureen of soup. (PB)
A romance between a poor doctor and a beautiful heiress ends happily when her brother's forgery swallows her fortune and so releases her from a long-standing engagement to a worldly man. (PB)
Tale of her first position as housemaid to a newly married couple, and of the murderous friendship of the husband's first love. She cares for the wife from the time she gives birth, and mother and child soon die. Includes a ghostly apparition in the maid's dreams. Well narrated. (PB)
An old maid school-teacher tells a summer boarder of her 32 year old romance of the nearby iron foundry, and how it was frustrated by a letter mislaid during house-cleaning. Life, however, proves to be long ... Pleasant. (PB)
A duel beside the Mississippi between Judge Taggard of New Orleans and Colonel Chase of Baton Rouge over a poker game aboard a steamer is averted by a wooden leg. Simple appeal. (PB)
Set in Victoria and Haly, an aspiring artist and musician choses ambition over the love of a gentle orphan. He finds success and love in Rome and Capri but death takes away the young wife while the orphan lives a life of service in Melbourne burying him at last in Kew cemetery. Some promise. (PB)
A child wins the heart of a misanthropic cripple and leads him to romance, and to discover that she is his own daughter. Slight, suburban setting. (PB)
Tragedy set beside Victoria's Goulburn River of a beautiful young girl courted artfully by a handsome commercial traveller. An anonymous letter reveals that he is already married just before she is to marry him. He never reappears and after a brief sojourn in Tasmania she returns to her old home to die. Certain quiet appeal. (PB)
Comic tale of a drunken cowardly Victorian police constable whose boasting resulted in his being locked up in his own goal by Ned Kelly, who then robbed the town bank. Not only did O'Shicer then lose his lady and the pie she had cooked but the strip from his uniform for lokcing up the new police inspector he assumed was an imposter. (PB)
A colonial romance set in 1878. The poor but respectable, spirited and attractive 21 year-old Dolly Wentworth takes a position as children's companion with a widower to meet a husband. Her progress is told through letters to her sister, and she seems to have found a young handsome suitor in her employer's cousin until an accident reveals the true state of her heart. Divertingly light. (PB)
A wealthy Victorian farmer's daughter receives two proposals by letter, one from a handsome but not yet established neighbour, one from a rich old man in Melbourne. She decides on the latter but fate intervenes and she mixes up the replies. (PB)
A tea party of adolescent girls write down the type of man they intend to marry. Over 20 years later they meet and discover none has married according to plan. (PB)