Mary Fortune

MF , publishing under the pseudonyms Waif Wander, M. H. F., and W. W., wrote in a range of genres for the Australian periodical market in the second half of the nineteeth century and into the first decade of the twentieth. Her output includes hundreds of works on crime and detection; she is arguably the first woman to publish in the genre. In addition, she wrote poetry, sketches of life in colonial Australia, other journalism, memoirs, serialised novels including a work of gothic fiction, a pantomime that has not survived, and a recipe.