Nell has a friend in need but will her kind heart wreck her chance for future happiness? Is Marie’s runaway kookaburra the last straw or the answer to her problems? A meddlesome prank and a stray kitten bring Helen and Gabriel together but will he be able to admit his feelings? Will Teresa’s faith in the Madonna bring her beloved Carlo home safely from the coral fishing? When Lily goes missing will Archibald trust his wife or listen to the ‘evidence’ of his domineering mother?
We think you will enjoy meeting the loyal, wilful and feisty heroines in Catherine Martin’s nineteenth-century tales of manners. How I Pawned My Opals and Other Lost Stories is a collaboration between Obiter and Dr Katherine Bode, Associate Professor at the Australian National University working in digital humanities, literary studies and book history. Catherine Martin (1848?-1937) was the author of poems, essays, short stories and novels, including the popular An Australian Girl (1890). All her stories in this collection were published in the Australian press between 1881 and 1898 but they have never been published in book form before.
Katherine Bode’s Australian Research Council funded project, To Be Continued, has unearthed an astonishing bibliographic index and full-text archive of fiction in Australian newspapers from 1803 to 1955. How I Pawned My Opals is just the first tapping of this rich vein of lost fiction.