AustLit

'Based on a true story. Sarah Evans takes us from the pitiless streets of eighteenth-century London to the convict village at The Rocks in Sydney and a rural farm on the Hawkesbury.

'As a poor, illiterate young woman, Sarah becomes entangled in a web of cruelty and corruption where powerful men rule and the law disregards women. Raised to believe she has no rights at all, not even to justice. Sarah meets a group of political rebels while she is a prisoner and is introduced to the concepts of liberty and equality. Despite what life throws at her, she learns her own value and begins to fight for her rights, supported throughout by the street network of women. When she is accused of murdering her own child and faces the death penalty, they don't let her down.

'In the end, it is the power of thoughts and words that shapes her life, not the hardship she has known, and friendship that teaches her the most important kind of freedom: liberty of mind. 'Is that not every woman's right?' (Publication summary)

'A Lady’s Pen provides the first complete and original transcripts of the surviving botanical letters of Georgiana Molloy, the first woman in Western Australia to become an internationally successful collector.

'In December 1839, Georgiana Molloy received an unexpected letter from Captain James Mangles in London asking her to collect specimens of native plants in the British settlement where she lived, on Wadandi Pibelmen country in Western Australia’s southwest. During the last six years of her life, they exchanged letters and Molloy sent Captain Mangles three exquisite collections of seeds and dried wildflowers from Taalinup and Undalup (Augusta and Busselton. Eminent gardeners and botanists considered Molloy’s specimens to be of the highest quality they had received from the ‘Swan River colony’ and the surviving specimens are still studied in herbariums around the world, today. In 1843, Georgiana Molloy died having received no payment or formal recognition for her scientific achievements.

'Bernice Barry’s A Lady’s Pen: The botanical letters of Georgiana Molloy presents the original extracts that Captain James Mangles preserved of her letters, and are considered the only significant, first-hand source of information about Georgiana Molloy’s botanical work. The historical filters within the letters are demystified and an account of Mangles’ own life helps to restore the voice missing from that long-distance conversation for 180 years.' (Publication summary)

'In 1829, estranged from her family and living in an isolated Scottish village, Georgiana Kennedy made a sudden decision to marry Captain John Molloy of the Rifle Brigade, a handsome hero with a mysterious past. They emigrated immediately to the remote southwest of Western Australia with the first small group of European settlers, and experienced great hardship in the fledgling colonies of Augusta and Busselton.

'In times of personal tragedy and privation, botany was Georgiana Molloy's salvation. She was self-taught and became the first internationally successful female botanist in WA. Her collections of the indigenous flora of the southwest include type specimens, archived today in the world's leading herbaria.' (Publication summary)