The Broad Arrow

Caroline Leakey, writing as Oliné Keese, published her first and only novel, The Broad Arrow, in 1859. It tells the story of Maida Gwynnham, a young middle-class woman lured into committing a forgery by her deceitful lover, Captain Norwell, and then wrongly convicted of infanticide. The novel’s title describes the arrow that was stamped onto government property, including the clothes worn by convicts—a symbol of shame and incarceration. With its ‘fallen woman’ protagonist, its gothic undertones and its exploration of the social and moral implications of the penal system, this little-known novel gives an insight into a significant chapter of Australian history from a uniquely female perspective. Published more than ten years before Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life (1870), it is also a neglected part of Australian literary history.

In this new critical edition, editor Jenna Mead restores material that was cut when the novel was reissued in a radically abridged version in 1886. This restored material is subtly highlighted, allowing interested readers to observe the extent and effect of the 1886 edits, without distracting from the story. It sheds light on the shifting tastes and priorities of the reading public and of publishers in the second half of the nineteenth century, while restoring for the first time in over a century the complete original text of Leakey’s important work.