Beyond Innocence by Joanna Lloyd7/5/2023 ![]() ![]() The history of white heterosexual romantic love and intimacy in Australia is different from other English-speaking countries such as Britain or the United States because of Australia’s particular conditions of colonial settlement. The choice of Australian convicts as the romantic protagonists of a love story is somewhat disconcerting given what we know about gender relations during this period of Australian history. ![]() While the first and most well-known Australian convict love story, Catherine Gaskin’s Sara Dane (based on the life of convict woman Mary Reiby), was published in 1954 and made into a television miniseries in 1982, it was not until the end of the twentieth century that novelists returned to the convict romance in works such as Candice Proctor’s Night in Eden (1997) and Whispers of Heaven (2001), Joanna Lloyd’s Beyond Innocence (2012), Tea Cooper’s Matilda’s Freedom (2013), and Lena Dowling’s Convict Wives series: The Convict’s Bounty Bride (2013), His Convict Wife (2013), and Convict Heart (2017). The 21st century has seen the rise of the Australian convict romance – a subgenre of both the Australian historical novel, as well as the romance novel. ![]()
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