Title: Mary Helena Fortune : an independent fly in the webs of Victorian society
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2019, vol. 45, iss. 1, pp. [129]-142
Extent
[129]-142
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2019-1-8
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/140999
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
Mary Helena Fortune (c. 1833–1909) was a pioneer Australian crime fiction writer. At a time when marriage and domesticity still largely defined women's lives, in her autobiographical journalism Fortune freely admitted to being selffinancing. She claimed that her tea tasted better when she remembered that she has "earned every penny of the money that bought it." It was unusual for a Victorian woman. And as her memoirs and journalistic prose testify, Fortune was anything but usual. The story of her life, her writing, her husbands, sons and lovers is extraordinary, and was potentially dangerous for Fortune, given the hypocritical morals of the time. Thus, being fully aware of the webs the Victorian society set for independent flies, Fortune wrote under a pseudonym of Waif Wander which sheltered her, and protected her income. Her memoirs, partly fictionalised, a common Victorian genre, reveal an extraordinary woman and extraordinary times in Australian history.
References
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[2] Brown, Megan (2014) A Literary Fortune. In: Maggie Tonki, Mandy Treagus, Madeleine Seys, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa (eds.) Changing the Victorian Subject. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 105–122.
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[2] Brown, Megan (2014) A Literary Fortune. In: Maggie Tonki, Mandy Treagus, Madeleine Seys, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa (eds.) Changing the Victorian Subject. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 105–122.
[3] Cixous, Helene (1976) The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs 1 (4), 875–893, translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen.
[4] Gilmore, Leigh (1994) Autobiographics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
[5] Knight, Stephen (1997) Continent of Mystery. Carlton: Melbourne University Press.
[6] Rich, Adrienne (1986) Notes toward a Politics of Location. In: Adriene Rich: Blood, Bread and Poetry. New York: Norton, 210–231.
[7] Smith, Sidonie (1994) Identity's Body. In: Ashley, Kathleen, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters (eds.) Autobiography and Postmodernism. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press Amherst, 266–292.
[8] Sussex, Lucy (2006) Mary Fortune: The Only Truly Bohemian Lady Writer Who Has Ever Learned a Living by Her Pen in Australia. Overland, 183, 54–60.
[9] Sussex, Lucy (ed.) (1989) The Fortunes of Mary Fortune. London: Penguin Books.
[10] Sussex, Lucy (2010) Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan.