As I began to delve into the topic, I found the website of Dr. Alison Alexander, a retired lecturer at the University of Tasmania who has written or edited thirty-three books, including The Companion to Tasmanian History; Tasmania’s Convicts: How Felons Built a Free Society; Repression, Reform & Resilience: A History of the Cascades Female Factory; Convict Lives at the Cascades Female Factory; and The Ambitions of Jane Franklin (for which she won the Australian National Biography Award). These books became primary sources for this novel. Dr. Alexander, who is herself descended from convicts, became an invaluable resource and a dear friend. She gave me a massive reading list and I devoured it all, from information about the prison system in England in the 1800s to essays about the daily tasks of convict maids to contemporaneous novels and nonfiction accounts. On my research trips to Tasmania, she introduced me to experts, took me to historic sites, and answered question after question, providing vital clarification and insights. She and her lovely husband, James, hosted me for dinner in their Hobart home on numerous occasions. Most of all, she read my manuscript with a keen and expert eye. I am grateful for her rigor, her encyclopedic knowledge, and her kindness.

Notable among the contemporary books I read on the subject of convict women are Abandoned Women: Scottish Convicts Exiled Beyond the Seas, by Lucy Frost; Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia, by Joy Damousi; A Cargo of Women: Susannah Watson and the Convicts of the Princess Royal, by Babette Smith; Footsteps and Voices: A Historical Look into the Cascades Female Factory, by Lucy Frost and Christopher Downes; Notorious Strumpets and Dangerous Girls, by Phillip Tardif; The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of Female Convicts Bound for Botany Bay, by Sian Rees; The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia’s Convict Women, by Deborah Swiss; Convict Places: A Guide to Tasmanian Sites, by Michael Nash; To Hell or to Hobart: The Story of an Irish Convict Couple Transported to Tasmania in the 1840s, by Patrick Howard; and Bridget Crack, by Rachel Leary. Books I read about Australian history and culture include, among others, In Tasmania: Adventures at the End of the World, by Nicholas Shakespeare; 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account and True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey; The Songlines, by Bruce Chatwin; and The Men that God Forgot, by Richard Butler.

Nineteenth-century novels and nonfiction accounts I read include Life of Elizabeth Fry: Compiled from Her Journal (1855), by Susanna Corder; Elizabeth Fry (1884), by Mrs. E. R. Pitman; The Broad Arrow: Being Passages from the History of Maida Gwynnham, a Lifer (1859), by Oline Keese (a pseudonym for Caroline Leakey); For the Term of his Natural Life (1874), by Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke; Christine: Or, Woman’s Trials and Triumphs (1856), by Laura Curtis Bullard; and The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, Volume 2 (1840–1841).