Mary Helena Fortune: Waif Wanderer or a cross-dresser with a mission?

Sa？etak At a time when marriage and domesticity still largely defined women’s lives, women often found increased freedom in the colonial environment where social expectations of them were more relaxed than in Europe. The first Australian crime fiction writer, Victorian Mary Helena Fortune in both, her life and in her writing, took advantage of this opportunity. Shrouding her private life in mystery, and writing under a pseudonym Waif Wander shielded her, and protected her income from the audiences whose Victorian values she did not share. Professionally, writing under a pseudonym, and within then but emerging literary genre, she had the liberty to speak freely: she discussed the issues of gender and identity in the hybrid and fluid colonial society which was being constructed as a place where identities could be forged, and redemption was possible, as is evident from the only printed (and reprinted) volume of her crime stories The Detective’s Album