In Ireland in 1795, young housemaid Elizabeth is arrested and charged with sedition.
On the transport ship, confined to the captain’s cabin, Elizabeth must please and obey. As the captain’s ship wife, she survives one of the most notorious transportation voyages to New South Wales. Six convicts are flogged to death. This so exceeds the usual brutality of transportation that Governor Hunter convenes a magistrates’ court to hear charges against the captain.
Shunned by her fellow convicts, scorned by free settlers, and pregnant with the captain’s child, Elizabeth must establish a home and a life in the rough town of Sydney.
The Ship Wife challenges assumptions about female convict history. It tells the story of a real woman’s struggle for dignity and independence in an Empire built on slavery and injustice.
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
The Ship Wife brings to burgeoning life Irishwoman Elizabeth Rafferty, her determined, shrewd survival of casual, brutal usage, by a succession of masters, to prosper as a pardoned convict in New South Wales and later Hobart Town. With enviable skill, Anne Vines makes vibrantly real Elizabeth’s abasement and recovery, her joys, terrors, loves and losses, in this finely-woven tissue of beguiling detail, rich in historical fact and lyrical invention.
– Cath Kenneally, journalist, broadcaster, novelist, award-winning poet, author of Room Temperature and Around Here
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Meticulously researched and deeply empathetic, this is an unforgettable story of a woman who overcomes impossible odds to survive.
–Toni Jordan, author of Prettier if She Smiled More
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Since childhood in Tasmania, I have been fascinated and appalled by the stories of the lives of women in the early days of the British invasion of this country. The Ship Wife is a graphic and dramatic account, rendered in fiction, that is a welcome addition to my reading. The historical facts of the life are completely arresting, while the narrative presented is fully dramatic and engaging, delivered in a traditional structure and tone. This saga of one humble Irish woman’s experience of some of the worst things that could happen to her in the early nineteenth century is startling and compelling in its vivid and unflinching detail. The novel is closely based on a vast body of meticulous research into the life of a woman who was wrongly convicted of sedition and was transported to Australia, suffering the most appalling conditions on the journey and in the colony, yet preserving her integrity and spirit. It is a tale, heart-rending and horrifying, of the triumph of one female life in a world of violent male dominance. Yet there are wonderful moments of poetic beauty with which the spirit of the protagonist, Elizabeth, as well as that of the reader, is nourished and uplifted. There are even male characters who display considerable fairness and humanity in this world of blind and overwhelming patriarchy. With something of the skill of a painter as well as a psychologist, author Anne Vines captivates the reader’s imagination and sympathy throughout. This novel is a glowing addition to the body of historical Australian fiction.
– Carmel Bird