The Power of History, Mystery, and DANGEROUS WOMEN
- Melissa Gouty
- 23m
- 4 min read
A novel by Hope Adams
The titillating title
I couldn’t resist the title. The words, Dangerous Women, pulled me in. Then I read the blurb, and I was hooked. The novel by Hope Adams, was based on a true story, included real characters, and was grounded in historical documents.
History, mystery, life at sea, and a cast of questionable characters. A great combination for a compelling story.
The power of patchwork
In 1841, a ship left London bound for Tasmania, carrying 180 women convicts. A social reformer in London, Elizabeth Fry, had been working since 1817 to improve the conditions of female prisoners throughout England. With the help of a committee of twelve other women, Elizabeth Fry extended her crusade to better the lives of female inmates including those who were being transported to penal colonies in Australia.
Women of the era had been trained in the art of needlework, and Elizabeth Fry started a program for female convicts on board ships bound for Australia and New Zealand. Fry’s idea was to provide each woman with a bag of fabric scraps and sewing implements. During the trip, the woman could stitch together a coverlet or quilt that she could use in her new home or sell for money to give her a start when she arrived.
In Dangerous Women, Kezia Hayter is a young, idealistic matron of the convict women on board the Rajah en route to a new life. Kezia is a real-life historical figure, a volunteer worker at the Millbank Penitentiary. She had been sent as an emissary from Elizabeth Fry’s group to help Jane Franklin, the wife of the governor of Tasmania, set up her own committee to improve the conditions of female convicts.
The novel correlates closely to historical records. Every day, Kezia Hayter corrals these “criminal” women for sewing sessions where they work on a group project, creating an embroidered, appliqued, patchwork quilt that was gifted to Jane Franklin upon their arrival to Hobart, Tasmania.
The framework of the novel is based on the real “Rajah” quilt, the appliqued coverlet now in the care of the National Gallery of Australia. The quilt depicted in Dangerous Women is the only extant, historically documented quilt made by convicts.
The “locked room” — or the ship at sea
You may have heard of the “locked room” mystery. One definition of a “locked room” mystery is a victim is found inside a locked room. Another definition has a broader meaning: a crime occurs in a remote location where one of the people present has to be the perpetrator of the crime.
Dangerous Women offers the best of the locked room strategies. You can’t, after all, get much more “remote” than in the middle of a vast ocean traveling on board a ship with no means of communication.
But unlike many mysteries where all the suspects seem like upstanding citizens, in this story, the suspects already have a “criminal” record.
Part of the appeal of the novel is that some of these women were real people of the time. Others are characters dreamed up by the author, Hope Adams. As the backstories of the characters are revealed, the reader also becomes aware of the horrors and injustices imposed on women in the early 19th century who had very few options. We understand the NEED for the kind of social reform that Elizabeth Fry was advocating.
The truth of historical fiction in Dangerous Women
The plot of the book is that once the ship has set sail, a young woman convict with a child is stabbed to death. As we learn the backstories of each of the women in the sewing circle, we begin to have our own suspicions as to who is the most likely killer.
We watch trists between sailors and the women, one resulting in a miscarriage. We see the effects of boredom, darkness, bad storms, slop buckets, and animosity between people, and everyone is suspect.
Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction.
In my book journal, I noted that I thought the book would have been better without the extraneous romance between Kezia and the captain of the ship. Silly me! I thought that the relationship between the matron and captain was something that the author had created and thrown in for popular interest and that it cheapened the plot.
Imagine my chagrin when I discovered that the romance was a historical fact. Kezia Hayter did, indeed, marry the captain of the Rajah in real life. By depicting the growing affection between the two people, the author, Hope Adams, was being true to the actual events, not throwing in a bit of fiction for the masses.
The Rajah Quilt
The development of relationships, the building of trust, the discovery of unique and interesting stories of each of the women are mirrored in the creation of the quilt. Various tiny pieces come together into a beautiful whole.
The Rajah Quilt was presented to Jane Franklin when the ship landed in Tasmania with this inscription implying that the convict women were, indeed, rehabilitated under the direction of Miss Hayter while they stitched and sewed and solved a murder.
“To the ladies of the convict ship committee, this quilt worked by the convicts of the ship Rajah during their voyage to van Dieman’s Land is presented as a testimony of the gratitude with which they remember their exertions for their welfare while in England and during their passage and also as a proof that they have not neglected the ladies kind admonitions of being industrious. June 1841.”
Melissa Gouty is NOT a dangerous woman,
but she likes to live vicariously in the stories of others!
If you buy a book or product in any format that you’ve discovered through Literature Lust,
I earn a small commission on the sale. Thank you!
Buy Dangerous Women from Amazon (online retailer)
Buy Roots from Bookshop.org (supports independent bookstores)