In conversation
Outrageous Fortunes | Nothing But Murders | Megan Brown in conversation
Megan Brown will be in conversation with Lucy Frost.
Outrageous Fortunes is the gripping story of Australia’s first female crime writer and her career-criminal son. When Mary Fortune arrived in Melbourne with her infant son in 1855, she was determined to reinvent herself. The Victorian goldfields were just the place. After a time selling sly grog and a bigamous marriage to a policeman, Mary became a pioneering journalist and author. The Detective’s Album was the first book of detective stories to be published in Australia and the first by a woman to be published anywhere in the world. Her work appeared in magazines and newspapers for over forty years – but none of her readers knew who she was. She wrote using pseudonyms, often adopting the voice of a male narrator to write about ‘unladylike’ subjects.
When Mary died in 1911, her identity was nearly lost. In Outrageous Fortunes, Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex retrieve Fortune’s astonishing career and discover an equally absorbing story in her illegitimate son, George. While Mary was writing crime, George was committing it, with convictions for theft and bank robbery. In their intertwined stories, crime fiction meets true crime, and Melbourne’s literary bohemia consorts with the criminal underworld.
Fortune tackled subjects such as murder, armed robbery, bootlegging, and sexual violence with a frankness unprecedented for a woman in the 19th century, in styles ranging from melodrama and Gothic horror to social realism and what is now called noir. If you would like to read some of these pioneering stories alongside Outrageous Fortunes, you’re in luck. Nothing But Murders and Bloodshed and Hanging brings together a collection of 17 of her finest stories, edited and introduced by Sussex and Brown, and restores her to her rightful place as a major crime writer. A limited number of copies of this book will also be available at the event.
Megan Brown completed her PhD at the University of Wollongong, examining the work of Mary Fortune. She has contributed chapters to The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature and The Unsocial Sociability of Women’s Life Writing.
Megan will be in conversation with Lucy Frost. Lucy has spent a career researching and writing about 19th-century women and children. She is the author of Convict Orphans, Abandoned Women, No Place for a Nervous Lady and other books, and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Tasmania.
Join Megan and Lucy at the Afterword Cafe. Tickets include a glass of wine or soft drink.
