AustLit

'Here is a novel of exiles seeking an unattainable home, amid them conceivably a first Australian woman painter, Jerusha Braddon. Daughter of a lighthouse keeper on the Shipwreck Coast, she grows up on an island, her companion a convict's son, her talent shaped by her parents' conflicts and her grandmother's fantasies. As the New World takes shape around her in its kindness and cruelty, she creates vivid, original seascapes and bush scenes until, attacked by a posse hunting Aboriginals, her works become a passionate demand for justice.'  (Publication summary)

'For Jerusha Braddon, only daughter of a lighthouse keeper and a gifted young painter, Melbourne in the last third of the nineteenth century should have been the zenith of her dreams. But hemmed in by poverty, dependence and inhibiting social conventions, she must instead confront the limitations of what women artists are permitted to do and to paint. When a reviewer comments on her painting Bushfire over Melbourne that the ferocity of its subject matter and its raw energy is unsuitable for a woman painter, she despairs of the suffocating situation.

'Forbidden as a woman to enter life classes, she takes an unusual and original step. She is supported in her unconventional choice by a cynical Collins Street art dealer, Peter Larchy, and more dangerously by capricious reckless, beautiful Christine, her future sister-in-law. The consequences of her actions are unforeseen and both tragedy and triumph follow.' (Publication summary)

'An Original Talent is complete in itself. But it is also the third novel in the trilogy about high-spirited Jerusha Braddon and her gallant struggle to survive as an independent woman painter in the 1870s Melbourne. It follows Fishing for Strawberries and Jerusha Braddon, Painter.

'The art dealer Peter Larchy has launched her first exhibition and she is elated at having dared to thrust in the public's eye a painting of a nude prostitute and a portrait of her murdered friend Christine. But her originality scandalises bringing social rejection, poverty and estrangement from her fiancé John. In love with Peter Larchy, she yet fears that marriage to him could destroy her independence as a painter. She asks herself if married women painted and admits despairingly, 'I knew none that did.'

'To avoid starving, she sketches passers-by in Bourke Street for two shillings. Torn between her timidities and her daring, she remains undaunted in her passion to create paintings that are groundbreaking and unique.

'And finally she courageously makes a decision about marriage.' (From the publisher's website.)