Corella Press Cover Reveal and Review: "The Millwood Mystery" | Historical Australian crime and mystery

I am excited to be finally sharing with you all about a project I have been involved in from earlier this year. Last semester I was an intern at the University of Queensland's Corella Press, an initiative with the aim of "discovering, editing, and publishing nineteenth-century Australian crime and mystery stories". All semester long we, as a group of interns and staff, worked at uncovering, editing and re-publishing a forgotten novel by nineteenth-century Australian writer, Jeannie Lockett. It was such an extraordinary experience--from the research of forgotten stories and authors from Australia's literary past, acquisition of unknown texts, to finally getting involved in publication as part of a publishing team! I share more about my internship experience in a guest post which I will be posting about shortly, so be sure to stay tuned for that. But today I am going to first reveal the cover designs of the two releasing books, and then review the book my team and I worked on republishing last semester, The Millwood Mystery by Jeannie Lockett. This is the second of two collectable books from the Corella Press collection launching this week at Avid Reader Bookshop, so if you live in the Brisbane area, consider coming to the event. It should be fun!

About Jeannie Lockett (bio taken from AustLit)

Jeannie Lockett, aunt of Mary Gilmore (q.v.), was the daughter of a farmer, Hugh Beattie, who emigrated to Australia before she was born from Country Antrim, Northern Ireland. She married fellow colonist Thomas Lockett on 27 May 1868, in Wagga, and was the mother of three children. In the years after her marriage, Lockett was the headmistress of several schools, including the Camperdown, Plunkett Street, Forest Lodge Public Schools, and the girls department of the Crown Street School in Sydney. She prepared many of her pupils for the university exams, and received high praise from a school inspector’s report for her work. 

Locket contributed social and political pieces for Westminister Review, Nineteenth Century, and St James’s Gazette in Britain, addressing female labour in Australia, and the question of divorce, especially for women. She was also a literary writer and novelist, with many of her stories appearing locally in the Australian Town and Country Journal and Evening News. Some of her work, such as The Millwood Mystery, An Awfully Sudden Death, The Garston House Tragedy, and The Case of Dr Hilston, were serialised by the Sydney Mail and the Australian Town and Country Journal. 

She died in Darlinghurst, Sydney at the age of forty-three, after suffering a fatal illness largely attributed to overwork (see 'Australian Town and Country Journal'), cutting short what otherwise could have been a brilliant career. 

My Review of The Millwood Mystery

The Millwood Mystery was originally serialised in the Australian Town and Country Journal (1886-1887), but this is the first time it finally gets published in novel form. The Millwood Mystery is a thrilling detective mystery with at its core a depiction of a family tragedy set in a sleepy country town of New South Wales. When Barbara Neill is found dead in her home, the only suspects are also her only relatives. A community filled with suspicion threaten to destroy the lives of more than just one person in the town. 

This story is filled with suspense and mystery, as a big part of the story revolves around the inquest around Barbara's suspicious death. This late nineteenth-century novel captures the tension of a who-done-it crime mystery with the psychological drama of the individual characters as they sort through their griefs, loves, jealousies and heartbreak. There are passages in this text that had me truly so gripped as I was doing my transcribing of some of the chapters, sometimes I felt like I couldn't type fast enough to figure out what would happen next! Lockett builds up a well developed mystery, that while not overtly-complex, has a satisfying depth to it that left me at times moved, shocked, empathising. 

A note on the literary style. Part of our aim as editors at Corella was to seek to honour Jeannie Lockett and her work "by helping twenty-first century eyes and ears engage with her nineteenth-century words and voice". As such, our aim was to really stay authentic to Lockett's true voice and authorial spirit, with minimal changes except for regulating punctuation/spelling, and providing a glossary for obscure or archaic words. A part of the joy of editing was engaging with Lockett's unique nineteenth-century style--the rich and detailed descriptions and heightened mode of narrative that caught Lockett's vision of the beauty and isolation of the Aussie bushland, and Australia's own nineteenth-century settler sensibilities within a small and common Aussie community. Lockett has further a dramatic and poetic flair to her style which is charming and transportive to its era. She combines her appreciation of nature with a deeper perception of human character and psychological struggles, particularly that of Aussie colonial women of the bush. A favourite line comes from chapter 2, in which Lockett describes the quiet nature of the town of Millwood:

"Yet they were nevertheless not wanting in the elements, which go to make up the great drama of human drama of life, with its strange admixture of serious and comic, tragic and humorous. For in Millwood, as elsewhere, the size of the stage and the number of actors did not always determine the character of the performance." - Chapter 2

If you're keen to dig into some of Australia's forgotten historical crime and mystery tales, the books in the Corella Press collection are not to miss! As the first two books to be published out of four books in the series, The Millwood Mystery and Bridget's Locket and Other Mysteries feature some amazingly beautiful cover illustrations by the Brisbane illustrator and creative artist, Kathleen Jennings--her design art captures the beauty and the whimsy as well as the dark and gothic of these Australian historical and mystery narratives, and are just absolutely beautiful. 

If you are in town, be sure to come to the book launch at Avid Reader this Friday joined with Meg Vann, Kim Wilkins and Mirandi Riwoe alongside the Corella Press team. From 30th August, both books will be available in hardback and ebook for purchase from the Corella Press website and at Avid Reader Bookshop. Also there are ebook and silhouette pendant giveaways of the Corella Press books happening at The Booklover Book Reviews and Danielle's blog, so be sure to head to those sites for a chance to win!

Photo of our Corella Press team semester 1, 2019, hard at work, sleep deprived from countless edits/proofreads, but super excited for our books! (image courtesy of Corella Press Instagram):

Left to right Corella Press intern team:
Joy, Tina, Despina, Katerina, Steph, Lianna, Mark, Sophie, Andrew