Mary Fortune
Mary Helena Fortune was an Australian journalist and author and was one of the earliest female writers of detective fiction. A prolific pseudonymous writer of fiction, poetry, and journalism, she contributed chiefly to The Australian Journal. Her best-known work, The Detective's Album, comprised more than 500 short stories published in the journal between 1868 and 1908. Fortune's writing was characterised by its unsparing portrayals of colonial society and urban Melbourne, including the prevalence of violence and the treatment of women.
Born in Ireland, Fortune moved to Canada as a child and travelled to Australia with her son in 1855, possibly to escape her marriage. She lived in the goldfields settlements that emerged during the Australian gold rushes, where she had another child, entered a short-lived bigamous marriage with a mounted policeman, and may have traded in illegal alcohol. Her early writings, including radical poetry, appeared in local goldfields newspapers. She then became a frequent and longstanding contributor to The Australian Journal after its founding in 1865.
Although best known for her short crime fiction, Fortune also wrote serial novels, poetry, journalism, memoir, and at least one play. Her work extended beyond crime fiction and included romance, Gothic fiction, and ghost stories. Drawing on her experiences in the goldfields and in Melbourne's rapidly urbanising environment, her writing often criticised colonial society—particularly its treatment of women—and examined the police's failure to address sexual violence and crimes against women.
Despite her popularity as a writer, Fortune experienced alcoholism, poverty, and periods of homelessness throughout her later life. Her surviving son, George Fortune, became a career criminal and spent more than 20 years in prison. Fortune died in 1911 shortly after leaving an asylum. Having written under several pseudonyms, her identity was nearly lost after her death until it was rediscovered by a book collector in the 1950s. Further details of her life have since been uncovered by the historian Lucy Sussex, who has written extensively about Fortune and her work.
Biography
Early life
Mary Helena Fortune was born Mary Wilson on 29 July 1832 in Carrickfergus near Belfast, Ireland, into a family of Scottish origin. Her mother Eleanor died less than six months after her birth. She moved to Montreal, Canada, as a child with her father, a civil engineer named George Wilson. Based on her later writings, Mary and her father may have left Ireland around 1846 during the early years of the Great Famine of Ireland. While nothing is known about Mary's education, historians believe that her writing indicates she was well-educated.Mary married a surveyor named Joseph Fortune on 25 March 1851 and had one son, Joseph George, in Canada. In 1855 she moved with her son to Australia to join her father, who had moved to the goldfields settlements that had emerged amid the Australian gold rushes. The historian Lucy Sussex speculates that Fortune likely fled Canada with her son to escape her marriage, knowing that Quebec's legal code at the time would have almost certainly granted custody of her child to his father in the case of a separation or divorce.
Life in the goldfields
Fortune arrived in Australia with her son on 4 October 1855. The day after her arrival, Fortune placed an advertisement in a local newspaper to inform her father of her arrival. According to one of her later pieces of autobiographical writing, Fortune eventually managed to make contact with her father and learned that he had opened a store at Kangaroo Flat near Castlemaine. She travelled to meet him on a Cobb & Co coach. Kangaroo Flat, located near Mount Alexander, was a bustling goldfields settlement where Fortune's tent also served as the town's general store. The goldfields were rife with crime, substance abuse, and sexual violence—themes that would later feature prominently in much of Fortune's writing.In 1856 Fortune and her father moved their store to the town of Buninyong near Ballarat. In November that year Fortune had another son, Eastbourne Vaudrey. She claimed on the birth certificate that her husband Joseph Fortune was the father; historians believe that this is unlikely, as there is no record of Joseph Fortune ever being present in Australia prior to his death in Canada in 1861. According to her memoir, soon after the birth Fortune moved north to Chinaman's Flat near Maryborough. Sometime before the middle of 1857 she moved to her final goldfields residence in the nearby town of Kingower. Sussex believes that Fortune may have begun to sell illegal alcohol on the goldfields during this period. In January 1858 Mary's elder son died of "convulsions". She married an Irish-born mounted constable named Percy Rollo Brett in October of that year in Dunolly, claiming on the marriage certificate that she was a widow. Her marriage to Brett was not a success, and he soon moved to New South Wales where he later married another woman.
Early writing
Fortune published her first pieces of writing under the initials "M. H. F." in local newspapers in 1855. In December 1855 she wrote a poem, "Song of the Gold Diggers", which was first published in the Mount Alexander Mail and then reprinted in other newspapers. The poem expressed Fortune's radical political sentiments and her sympathies for the cause of the Eureka Stockade rebels. She was offered a job at the Mount Alexander Mail in 1855, but the offer was withdrawn when it was discovered that "M. H. F." was in fact a woman with a young child.Fortune began writing for the newly founded Australian Journal in 1865 and soon adopted the pen name "Waif Wander". The Australian Journal was a weekly magazine that borrowed from the design and business model of the successful London Journal. It attempted to attract readers by featuring locally written fiction. Fortune's first contribution to the journal, a poem addressed to her son, appeared in its second issue. In subsequent issues Fortune would contribute additional poems, a fictional memoir of her life in the goldfields, and her first work of detective fiction—a short story titled "The Stolen Specimens". Sussex believes that this was likely the world's first work of fiction written by a woman from the perspective of a detective. In November 1865 The Australian Journal announced that it would be publishing a series of crime stories by Fortune and the writer James Skipp Borlase. Fortune wrote a number of short crime stories for the journal as part of the series, including one of her best-known stories, "The Dead Witness". Borlase, a serial plagiarist, was credited as the author of several pieces in the series that are now believed to have been written partially or wholly by Fortune.
In 1866 and the early months of 1867, Fortune published four serial novels in The Australian Journal under her pen name "Waif Wander". By the following year Fortune is known to have been living on a farm in Oxley, and began to write short crime stories under the initials "W. W.". Most of Fortune's detective writing would continue to be published under these initials; Fortune's biographers Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown have suggested that this may have been in order to create a separation between the feminised novels of "Waif Wander" and the more masculine crime writing of "W. W.". One of these early short stories, "The White Maniac: A Doctor's Story", would become Fortune's most reprinted work. The story is a work of Gothic horror that recounts the story of a woman whose family confines her in an environment devoid of any colour when it is discovered that seeing anything but white causes her to become violent and homicidal.
Life in Melbourne
In 1868 Fortune moved to Melbourne. She wrote an account of her journey titled "Fourteen Days on the Roads" for The Australian Journal describing her observations of colonial society during the journey. That year she also began writing her longest-running and best-known work, The Detective's Album, a series of crime stories published in The Australian Journal over the course of the next forty years. In Melbourne, Fortune also began to write "panoramic" journalism about her observations of the urban environment.In 1869 The Australian Journal switched from a weekly to a monthly publication frequency. Fortune's contributions to the journal were so significant that her writing would often be attributed variously to "M. H. F.", "Waif Wander", or "W. W." to disguise the fact that so much of the writing in each issue shared the same author. Between 1869 and 1870, Fortune also contributed nine stories to the journal's "Ladies' Page" under the pen name "Sylphid".
To supplement her income, Fortune began to work as a governess or housekeeper after her arrival in Melbourne, where she lived in the working-class suburbs of Fitzroy and Collingwood. Beginning in the 1870s, Fortune was arrested on multiple occasions for drunkenness and vagrancy. She was an alcoholic and barely earned enough from her writing to support herself. Fortune's contributions to The Australian Journal began to decrease in 1870, likely due to the appointment of her rival Marcus Clarke—with whom she had a strained relationship—as the journal's "conductor".
In July 1871 Fortune's 14-year-old son George was arrested for stealing a hat and was labelled a "neglected child". Fortune was living in an institution for unemployed governesses without the means to pay for housing. George was sentenced to spend the next two years in a reform school in Sunbury. At the time, persuading the authorities to release a child from care depended largely on the respectability of the child's parents. While the exact reasons are unknown, Fortune was unsuccessful in her attempts to have George released.
In 1871 Fortune published her only book, a short story collection featuring stories reprinted from her series The Detective's Album. Sussex and Brown believe Fortune may have hoped that publishing a book would provide her with the respectability and cultural capital required to have her son released to her care. How Fortune financed the publication of the book is unknown. Later that year, she began writing her next serial novel for The Australian Journal, titled The Bushranger's Autobiography, featuring a protagonist based on her second husband Percy Rollo Brett.
Fortune's son George began running away from the reform school and committing petty crimes. In 1872 he was sentenced under a false name to a year in a reformatory located aboard a hulk named the Sir Harry Smith for stealing tobacco. With George increasingly coming into conflict with the law, Fortune seemingly lost interest in writing from the perspective of the police. She instead began a new series in late 1872 titled Navvies' Tales: Retold by the Boss; she would not write another story in The Detective's Album series for several years. By 1873, an entry for Fortune's son in the Children's Register indicated that his mother may have been living in a de facto relationship with a man named James Davidson. That year, George Fortune was moved to a new reformatory inside Pentridge Prison along with the other boys aboard the Sir Harry Smith. Fortune began publishing additional pieces in a new Catholic weekly publication called The Advocate, with several of her pieces written during this period featuring relationships between mothers and their sons. George Fortune was released in March 1873 and paroled to an employer, but quickly ran away and was arrested for burglary six months later. He was sentenced to two more years in the reformatory as a result. Upon his arrest, the police reported that his mother was "a drunk" living "in poor circumstances". By February 1874 she may have been living in another de facto relationship with a man named Rutherford. George was released in March 1875 and was sent to work on a farm near Kilmore owned by a former police officer, where he would remain out of trouble with the law for the next four years.
With The Australian Journal beginning to experience financial difficulties, Fortune began to write additional short stories for The Herald in a series titled "Police Stories". She also made some extra income through the syndication of her stories to various local newspapers as part of a literary supplement. She lived for a time in Lilydale, but after George was sentenced to another term of imprisonment, she returned to Melbourne in 1879 to be nearer to him at Pentridge Prison. He had received his first adult jail sentence for "felonious receiving" after the theft of £100 from a neighbouring farmer. In August of that year she began editing a "Social Sketches" column for The Herald under the name "Nemia". One piece recounted her visit to Pentridge Prison to visit her son; she was likely sacked at the end of 1879 as a result of the damage it caused to her reputation.
In September 1881 Mary Fortune began publishing her ultimately unfinished memoir, Twenty-Six Years Ago, in serial form in The Australian Journal. George spent most of the period between 1881 and 1899 imprisoned for various crimes, including sentences for armed bank robbery and burglary. During this period Mary Fortune began to write a number of stories centred on rehabilitation and the ways in which men were led to commit crime. In 1899 George was released and left for Tasmania under a new identity. He continued to re-offend and was sentenced to three more terms of imprisonment, before finally receiving another 10-year sentence in 1904 for burglary. In May 1907 he died of Bright's disease at Hobart Gaol, likely exacerbated by the poor conditions inside the prison and the time he had spent in irons and solitary confinement as punishment for an attempted escape. Brown and Sussex have noted that while George Fortune was a repeat offender, he was not a violent man and was instead "damned by dodgy friends" and frequently set up by police and informants. Sussex has also observed the gap between the life of George Fortune and the fiction of his mother, writing that Mary Fortune's writing showcased the "big melodramas of murder and bushranging" rather than the petty crimes of criminals like her son.