Anne Vines, The Ship Wife, Glass House Books, Brisbane, 2023, pp.244
ISBN: 9781922830241
RRP: $33
A Book Review by Frances Devlin-Glass
This historical fiction by Anne Vines is her first published novel, though she has a long list of awards as a writer of short stories, and distinguished service as a teacher of literature and history, curriculum designer and examiner. It’s a novel that is productively transgressive in many ways, at the same time as it adopts the discipline imposed by historical data and amplifies it responsibly and with feeling.
The Ship Wife is very much a novel of our times, and readers will be surprised to learn how closely it is tethered to the facts of Elizabeth Rafferty’s trial as a political convict in 1795 and her transportation to the colony of New South Wales in 1897 on board the Britannia II. Conveniently, the author supplies a timeline of Rafferty’s known biographical facts (featuring 49 dot points extending over four pages), and an extensive bibliography of works that have informed her writing. These are not normal accoutrements in a historical novel, but they are welcome additions to this one.
The main way in which the novel transgresses is to refuse convict Elizabeth the role of ‘victim’. She was undoubtedly initially the victim of an oppressive system in which the Irish lower classes were pressed into domestic service before puberty, and made radically vulnerable to an entitled gentry employer. He dehumanised her (refusing permission to attend family funerals), and worse, routinely assaulted her and her kind sexually, with the connivance of Milady. Her Catholic conditioning was such that she blamed herself for these unwanted attentions of the master, and her vulnerability is enough to diminish her morally in the eyes of her (initially) gentle first love, Michael.
The crime for which Elizabeth was arraigned is alleged partisanship with agrarian political activists, the Defenders, in the lead up to the 1798 United Irishmen’s rebellion. The Defenders targeted and burnt the Big House in which she was employed, and she is caught up in the fracas while returning with Michael, a Defender, from a romantic Sunday ramble. So, again, she is an accidental victim. Her misfortunes compound when she is assaulted again by guards, gang-raped, while a prisoner in a mixed gender gaol, Kilmainham (its antecedent institution in fact), and is transported for a seven-year term.
At an early point in the novel, her involuntary embarkation for Australia, Elizabeth self-consciously moves out of the condition of being an innocent and unknowing victim. She makes savvy judgements and choices about what her survival and flourishing entail. She acts very much in the light of her experience and in defiance of her culture and upbringing in choosing to become the mistress of the ship’s captain. She makes a calculation about (many) men being heartless, about the high risk of mortality by starvation or punishment as a convict below-decks (one that is validated during the journey), and falls back on her physical assets, her comeliness.
Anne Vines, while adhering to the facts, imaginatively fills in the gaps in the record, and has Elizabeth judging survival to be a higher value than protecting her virtue. She is no holy picture saint, not a Maria Goretti or a St Lucia. Her pragmatism and independence in the conditions in which she found herself one can easily sympathise with, albeit from the vantage point of a largely secular culture in the more liberated twenty-first century. It is a novel that strongly defends life rather than martyrdom, contrary to versions of Irish womanhood that trade in piety and purity above all, and that saw political sacrifice as heroic and nation-defining (‘hate the English to the death’). Elizabeth, however, makes her liberated choices in the late eighteenth century, and they will eventually lead to a life beyond the world of men in commerce and farming in Sydney. One has to keep reminding oneself that this is a story based in fact and to relish her strength of character, resolve, and common sense. I enjoyed the nuanced way Anne Vines represents Elizabeth’s moral wrestling with her inherited value-system (the ‘rats running round and round, agitating her till she lost her serenity, and her ability to think and pray’). She thinks counter-culturally too in querying the uses of political martyrdom:
Her Da and uncles sat around the fire recalling who I the family had fought the English Protestant King, and died long ago, but what had their deaths won for their people…how those deaths helped the mothers, sisters, wives and daughters (p.35).
The Britannia II, the ship she was transported on, constituted a low point in the transportation system, and issued in a trial about the captain’s and surgeon’s standards of care. Such matters would later be more regulated and improved after a court case in Sydney. This historical detail serves to validate after the event Elizabeth’s choices to opt for the unexpected berth in the captain’s cabin rather than a life as a convict woman below deck with its attendant high risk of punishment and even death, by flogging or suicide. The captain’s patronage also afforded her a measure of education as this intelligent woman was open to being taught geography, globes, routes, and eventually literacy.
Nothing came easily for Elizabeth Raftery. The novel catalogues a series of lovers/would-be husbands, some with the promise of tenderness and happy-ever-afters, but none delivered on such promises, nor could the men rise above prejudice about her as a whore, or convict or Irish, or all three. I was often reminded of the exploits of Moll Flanders in Defoe’s eponymous novel but the difference is that Moll was a trickster and duplicitous, while Elizabeth is sensual, feeling and family-minded. Perhaps her main consolations (after many reverses in love) were her children of several men, one of whom makes a good marriage with the son of one of her former lovers, an ex-slave-trader. But her first-born is lost to her after she made it possible for him to train to be an officer in England. A strange synchronicity is the publication almost contemporaneously by Shauna Bostock of a book about the father of Elizabeth’s son-in-law, Robert Bostock (convicted slave-trader).
This novel examines the cruel system of convictism, the born-to-rule assumptions of Empire and its subjugation by violence of its first (Ireland) and a subsequent colony (Australia), and the injustices of a marriage system that robbed women of rights. It does all of this through the lens of a woman we recognise as a feminist who would liberate herself by her own common-sense from the assumptions of these systems. The starting point for doing so is questioning the primacy of her inherited religion. It’s a compelling read, and an enlightening one.
Frances Devlin-Glass
Frances is a member of the Tinteán collective and taught Irish and Australian Literatures and Women’s writing at Deakin University.
In the interests of full disclosure, Anne Vines and Frances Devlin-Glass have been friends since 1976, and belong to the same book club.
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