AustLit

When Furphy completed the typescript of Such is Life in 1898 it contained the foundations of Rigby's Romance in its fifth chapter. Acquiescing to the demands of his publisher in 1901, Furphy extracted the fifth and second chapter and replaced them with shorter chapters that altered the narrative and central themes of the longer work. Furphy began shaping the fifth chapter into novel form while the new version of Such is Life was being prepared for publication in 1903. He tested publishers with a typescript of Rigby's Romance with little success.

Furphy moved to Perth in 1905 to join his sons who had established an iron foundry, and it was from there that he continued negotiations with publishers about the works he had extracted from the 1898 version of Such is Life. Rejected by the Western Mail, a West Australian weekly, Furphy subsequently offered the novel to the Melbourne Tocsin and the Sydney Worker with the same result before he succeeded in capturing the attention of Robert Ross. Editor of Broken Hill’s Barrier Truth weekly newspaper, Ross agreed to serialise the novel, but by this time, Furphy had given up on asking for payment, telling Miles Franklin that he ‘was willing to put it in the plate of Democracy as a contribution’. The serialisation of Rigby’s Romance appeared in the Barrier Truth from 27 October 1905 to 20 July 1906.

A new critically established text of Rigby's Romance will be added here in the near future. This new edition will use the 1898 typescript as copytext to best present Furphy's method of punctuation, and take substantive readings from the Barrier Truth serialisation ... unless a typescript of Rigby's Romance comes to light.

Until that time, the best available electronic text is the Furphy Digital Archive's transcription of Rigby's Romance (1946). This text has been published on a newly established website devoted to text editing and annotation, Tom Collins and Company. Previously, the only version of Rigby's Romance available online was the abridged version, first published in 1921. Click here to read the unabridged version. For a discussion of the revision and publication of Rigby's Romance, see The Life of Such is Life: A Cultural History of an Australian Classic.