Force and Fraud Read Free Page B

September 1863, she taught in Portland, at Common School 510, formerly a Catholic school, but from 1862-71 under the Board of Education. Her successor at the school was another remarkable Catholic woman, Mary MacKillop. 29
    Ellen left for a new career as a public speaker, touring through country Victoria. Such lecture tours were frequently advertised in colonial newspapers; but no other contemporary woman in Australia is known to have attempted the feat. It was here that she revealed the Trollope connection. Fortunately Anthony Trollope had yet to write his He Knew He Was Right (1868), which includes a most unflattering depiction of a female lecturer. Ellen also told journalists she planned to return to England as a lecturer to prospective emigrants; something that did not occur. Instead, she turned to literature. 30
    It is not known when she started writing, but certainly she had the example of the Trollope in-laws. The chief inspiration would not have been Anthony, but his famous mother Frances. She also was an independent-minded woman, who began a family writing trade with a bestselling travelogue. Her novels significantly contain crime elements, notably the mystery Hargrave (1843), which also includes a romance. Other women drawn into the Trollope circle by marriage took to writing, notably the two Ternan sisters, Maria and Frances (sisters of Dickens’ mistress Ellen), the latter of whom married Anthony’s brother Tom. Anthony wrote, in his short story ‘Mrs Brumby’, authorship “seems to be the only desirable harbour in which a female captain can steer her vessel with much hope of success”. However, there is no evidence that he assisted his wife’s sister; nor that she exploited his name in placing her work.
    Because of Australia’s origins as a penal colony, crime content figured in its literature from the beginnings. Generic crime fiction form, as found in Force and Fraud , came later. Content and form only began to coalesce in the 1850s, the era of the sometimes lawless goldrushes, when interest in Australia was an intense, auctorial selling point. Expatriate John Lang (1816–1864), the first Australian-born writer, combined crime matter with the detective in his novel The Forger’s Wife (1855), set in convict-era Sydney. The novel was vigorous and realistic, most notably in the character of the thief-taker (bounty hunter and proto-detective) George Flower, based on a real-life Sydney identity, Israel Chapman. However, the work was more of a picaresque adventure than a formally structured detective mystery; Flower getting his results by guile and violence rather than deduction.
    On 26 January 1865 the first known Australian example of the detective story appeared, published in the supplement to the provincial Hamilton Spectator . ‘Wonderful! When You Come to Think of It!’ was a sprightly parody informed by Poe, with a detective fiction fan becoming an amateur sleuth. The author was named as M. C., whom Nan Bowman Albinski has identified as almost certainly the teenage Marcus Clarke, later to become famous with His Natural Life . Clarke owned detective story books, and in the original serial version, his novel had the murder mystery structure. “Wonderful” was followed by another newspaper story: “Experiences of a Detective” by E. C. M., narrated by a police detective, though less lively work. 31
    These works had no apparent influence on Force and Fraud . It was a genuine original, well ahead of its time and literary context. Nor was it apparently her first publication, as she was cited as the author of Edith Travers (as yet untraced).
    The novel was the lead serial in the first issue of the Australian Journal: a Weekly Record of Literature, Science and the Arts (2 Sept. 1865). The magazine was closely modelled on the London Journal , also a fiction magazine, but with a difference – its major subject matter was crime. As such, it reflected not