Lucy Sussex

If MF is indeed the author of either The Stolen Specimens or Traces of Crime, then she is, Lucy Sussex argues, the earliest known female writer of detective fiction. Both stories pre-date the serialization...

In publishing her poem Cooée in the The Australian Journal, MF first used her pseudonym Waif Wander.

The Australian Journal carried MF 's The White Maniac: A Doctor's Tale, a far more sensational and macabre short story than My Lady Jane.

MF , as W. W., contributed to The Australian Journal the first of The Detective's Album series of stories (later collected as a volume): The Red Room.

MF apparently began her literary career publishing poetry in local Australian newspapers. Her critic and biographer Lucy Sussex characterizes some of this poetry as politically radical.

MF never explicitly stated her reasons for choosing her pseudonym, although in her article How I Spent Christmas, 1869, she describes herself as both a waif and a lonely wanderer. This...

Although stories in Memoirs of an Australian Police Officer and Adventures of an Australian Mounted Trooper first appeared without attribution, a number of them were soon re-issued under his own name by James Skipp Borlase

Recent editions and general knowledge of Fortune owe a great deal to the work of critic and novelist Lucy Sussex . Sussex was responsible for editing and introducing the collection The Fortunes of Mary Fortune...

Lucy Sussex describes Dora Carleton as a rather less polished but more intriguing work than its predecessor, Bertha's Legacy.

To critic Andrew ManghamThe White Maniac examplifies a Victorian fascination with the potential for violence and irrationality in female adolescents, and detection as sustain[ing] a number of social hierarchies through the actual and figurative...

Lucy Sussex describes The Detective's Album as a somewhat mixed bag.

Lucy Sussex describes The Bushranger's Autobiography as an action melodrama, and compares it unfavourably with Marcus Clarke 's contemporaneous His Natural Life. While it contains some fine writing, she suggests it...

Indeed, her whole motivation at this time is murky: though she apparently had a work-related reason, she may have been escaping from her marriage. Lorna Sage , following Lucy Sussex , suggested that MF was...

The extent and nature of MF 's education is unknown, but her writing is sprinkled with Latin and French, and critic Lucy Sussex writes that she was adept at written English [and] sometimes used an...