Continuing our focus on pioneering women during Women’s History Month, Lucy Sussex and Dr Megan Brown chat with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies in this Biographers in Conversation interview about their choices while researching and crafting Outrageous Fortunes: The Adventures of Mary Fortune, Crime-Writer, and Her Criminal Son George. Together, Lucy and Megan resurrect a woman who vanished from literary history despite publishing over 500 crime stories across four decades in colonial Melbourne.
Outrageous Fortunes
After selling sly grog for a while and a bigamous marriage to a policeman, Mary Fortune became a pioneering journalist and author. Her The Detective’s Album was the first book of detective stories to be published in Australia and the first by a woman to be published anywhere in the world.
Why is revisionist biography so important, especially for women?
When Mary died in 1911, her identity was nearly lost. In Outrageous Fortunes, Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex retrieve Fortune’s astonishing career and discover an equally absorbing story in her illegitimate son, George. In their intertwined stories, crime fiction meets true crime, and Melbourne’s literary bohemia consorts with the criminal underworld.
Writing under pseudonyms such as Waif Wander and W.W., Fortune’s most striking feature was her voice, which was vivid, immediate and remarkably modern for a 19th-century writer, particularly in her autobiographical journalism.
One of Mary Fortune’s serialised crime stories, written under a nom de plume, from 1867.
Outrageous Fortunes’s genius lies in its dual structure. While Mary wrote crime fiction, George lived it, beginning as a troubled teenager and progressing to bank robbery and safecracking. When archival gaps obscured Mary’s life, George’s extensive prison records filled the void.
George haunted his mother’s fiction. From childhood appearances thumbing his Bible and visiting wax museums to stories about street urchins valuable to police and convicts attempting to go straight, Mary continually tried to reimagine her son’s story with a happy ending.
Why Mary Fortune’s story is so important
Outrageous Fortunes is revisionist biography at its finest: the retrieval of a woman’s voice, correction of the historical record and a portrait of colonial Australia rendered through the intertwined lives of a groundbreaking writer and her ill-fated child.
Praise for Outrageous Fortunes
‘Mary Fortune’s bold fictions electrified colonial Australia. But her own story, pieced together by two tenacious literary detectives, was best of all.’
—Gideon Haigh
‘A fine introduction to the author and her work.’
—Garry Disher
‘Outrageous Fortunes is a delight: beautifully written and carefully researched, it is an engrossing, illuminating and ultimately deeply moving portrait of an extraordinary woman and her ne’er-do-well son. The pioneering crime writer Mary Helena Fortune finally receives the biography she deserves, and no mystery reader should be without it.’
—John Connolly
‘This book contains scrupulous scholarship with lively, stylish writing and like all good biographies it weaves the details of its subjects’ lives with the global events and the social mores and moralities that produced them, their lives shaped by the wild forces of history.’
‘I became enthralled...this engrossing book.’
Australian
‘An intriguing detective story.’
AGE/Sydney Morning Herald
‘In the field of literary studies, Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown’s Outrageous Fortunes: The adventures of Mary Fortune, crime-writer, and her criminal son George (La Trobe University Press) told the fascinating story of the underworld-adjacent crime writer Mary Fortune. Thanks to her status as the first female author of detective fiction, this work,
is globally important.’
Stuart Kells
Lucy Sussex was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and now lives in Australia. She has worked as a librarian, researcher, academic and had a weekly newspaper review column for 14 years. Her major fields of expertise are crime history and Victorians, with an abiding interest in forgotten women’s lives. She has published over twenty books, appearing internationally, in various genres and for diverse audiences.
She began her writing career as a poet, but turned to prose at 21, with a writer’s workshop taught by SF editor Terry Carr, and the author George Turner. Within a short time she was selling short stories, winners of Ditmar, Aurealis and Sir Julius Vogel awards, which have appeared in Year’s Best collections and been translated widely. She has also received the A. Bertram Chandler award for Outstanding Achievement in Australian SF.
After completing her doctorate at the University of Wollongong examining aspects of the prolific writings of Mary Fortune, Megan Brown has continued to research this extraordinary Australian author. She has contributed chapters about Fortune in a number of academic books, published papers in academic journals and delivered conference papers both in Australia and internationally concerning Fortune and other remarkable Australian figures of the Victorian era.
Brown’s career has reflected her wide range of interests and included many years of teaching science as well as teaching nineteenth century literature. She has drawn on both scientific and literary interests in researching colonial botanist and novelist, Louisa Atkinson and colonial surgeon and polymath Thomas Young Cotter.
Brown has co-authored a biography of Mary Fortune and her son George with Lucy Sussex entitled Outrageous Fortunes. It was released in February 2025.