The case of Mary Dean: Sex, poisoning and gender relations in Australia

The genre of biography is, by nature, imprecise and limited. Real lives are lived synchronously and diversely; they do not divide spontaneously into chapters, subjects or themes. All biographers construct stories, in the process forcing the disordered complexity of an actual life into a neat literary form. This doctoral submission comprises a book length creative work, Poisoned: The Trials of Mary Dean, and a reflective written component on that creative work, Writing Fictionalised Biography.

Poisoned is a biography of Mary Dean, who, although repeatedly poisoned by her husband at the end of the nineteenth century, did not die. This biography, presented in the form of a first-person memoir, is based closely on historical evidence and is supported with discursive notes and a select bibliography.

The reflective written component, Writing Fictionalised Biography, outlines the process and challenges of writing a biography when the source material available is inadequate and unreliable. In writing Poisoned my genre solution has been fictionalised biography biography which is historically diligent while utilising fictional writing strategies and incorporating fictional passages. This written component reflectively discusses how I arrived at that solution. It includes discussion of the sources I utilised in writing Poisoned, including the limitations of trial transcripts and other court records as biographical evidence; useful precursors to the form; the process wherein I located both a form for my fictionalised biography and a voice for my biographical subject; possible models I considered; how I distinguished established fact from speculative supposition in the text; as well as some of the ambivalences and ethical concerns such a narrative process implies.