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Georgiana
A mixture of fact and fiction, this novel tells the story of a young pioneer woman, Georgiana Molloy, and her family as they settle in to the alien bushland of Augusta, Western Australia from England, on their promised land grant. Threaded through the pioneering adventures is the (imagined) story of young Will Summerfield and his sister Charlotte, the children of a hopeful yet weak mother who has married a violent stepfather, Thomas, a man keen to take up land grants in the New World at whatever cost to his wife and stepchildren. At 23 years of age Georgiana has married retired military man Captain Jack Molloy, undertaking the five-month journey on a small sailing ship, the Warrior, crammed with other settlers, their farming animals and faming tools and their hopes of making their fortunes in Australia. Fortune does not smile on young Georgiana at first, when she gives birth to her first baby girl, camping on the beach, nine days after landing. Will finds himself drawn to this gentle and friendly woman, who more than once has shown him kindness on the ship voyage out.
Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
27 people want to read
About the author
Libby Hathorn
99 books32 followersLibby Hathorn is an Australian writer who produces poetry, picture books, drama, novels, short stories, and nonfiction for children, young adults, and adults. Best known in the United States for her critically acclaimed novel Thunderwith, Hathorn has created works ranging from serious stories of troubled youth to lighthearted, fast-paced comedies. She writes of powerful female characters in her novels for junior readers, such as the protagonists in All about Anna and The Extraordinary Magics of Emma McDade; or of lonely, misunderstood teenagers in novels such as Feral Kid, Love Me Tender, and Valley under the Rock. As Maurice Saxby noted in St. James Guide to Children's Writers, "In her novels for teenagers especially, Hathorn exposes, with compassion, sensitivity, and poetry the universal and ongoing struggle of humanity to heal hurts, establish meaningful relationships, and to learn to accept one's self—and ultimately—those who have wronged us."
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 5, 2013
WORST BOOK EVER!
NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER AGAIN!
NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER AGAIN!
August 9, 2013
Had to read this for school.
Never, ever again.
Sometimes historical fiction can be good.
This is not one of those times.
Never, ever again.
Sometimes historical fiction can be good.
This is not one of those times.
August 17, 2020
Simply but beautifully written, this novel takes us inside the life of Georgiana Molloy who settled at Augusta, south of Perth, in the 1930s. Facing hardship, loneliness and loss she managed to create a home for her family while collecting Australian botanical specimens which were sent to England for study. Sadly, she died at an early age due to complications following child birth. Her passion for flowers and her care for other people, without regard for race of class, stand out in this story.
May 10, 2012
I finally read a book all the way through ... admittedly some of my motivation was to stop being asked by my mother whether I had read it yet (I had it on her recommendation) but in the end it wasn't a bad read. The writing style comes across as narrative which is to be expected given the book is based on an actual person whose family were instrumental in the settling of WA. Worth the read for historical value alone... ():)
January 31, 2013
Georgiana is a historical fiction about the real life botanist and early Western Australian settler, Georgiana Molloy. It follows her journey, and the journey of another family who is settling along with them, as they travel to Western Australia, soon developing the town of Augusta. Although it briefly goes into her time near the Vasse River, most of the book concentrates on her time in Augusta.
While the subject of Georgiana Molloy is certainly fascinating, I found most of the book very tedious to read. There’s no doubt that it was an incredibly well researched book – but sometimes it felt like I was reading more facts than story. It also slipped uneasily between historical fiction and memoir for a lot of the book, which made it difficult to read, and quite wearing to the reader. I felt like I was constantly being told the same thing about Georgiana, though this did ease up by the end. Additionally, the story of the other family (which I assume was the fiction part of the story) felt quite over-dramatic and at odds with the story of Georgiana and her family.
Georgiana really was a remarkable woman. She took on a demanding role as Magistrate’s wife (and often Magistrate while her husband was away) and set up house in a brand new, challenging settlement. She experienced horrific losses, with one child dying soon after birth and her son dying after falling in a well. She had an extremely difficult time recovering after childbirth, but still managed to become a well regarded botanist. Her story is amazing, and I would love more Australian children to learn about her. Unfortunately, I don’t think this will be the book that will do that.
On a side note, Australia is not particularly good at providing good biographical books about notable people in our history. When we taught biographies to grade 7s in 2012, we desperately wanted to include a number of Australian choices for the students to write about. However, they were extremely limited in the research they could do – confined to websites and books which were incomplete or written for an adult audience. There’s a fabulous series of biographies for children from the United States – the Who Was . . . series – which tells the story of notable people in an engaging and entertaining fashion. It would be awesome to see Australian writers take on a project like this – and it would be a great way to share people like Georgiana Molloy.
This review originally appeared at Adventures of a Subversive Reader
While the subject of Georgiana Molloy is certainly fascinating, I found most of the book very tedious to read. There’s no doubt that it was an incredibly well researched book – but sometimes it felt like I was reading more facts than story. It also slipped uneasily between historical fiction and memoir for a lot of the book, which made it difficult to read, and quite wearing to the reader. I felt like I was constantly being told the same thing about Georgiana, though this did ease up by the end. Additionally, the story of the other family (which I assume was the fiction part of the story) felt quite over-dramatic and at odds with the story of Georgiana and her family.
Georgiana really was a remarkable woman. She took on a demanding role as Magistrate’s wife (and often Magistrate while her husband was away) and set up house in a brand new, challenging settlement. She experienced horrific losses, with one child dying soon after birth and her son dying after falling in a well. She had an extremely difficult time recovering after childbirth, but still managed to become a well regarded botanist. Her story is amazing, and I would love more Australian children to learn about her. Unfortunately, I don’t think this will be the book that will do that.
On a side note, Australia is not particularly good at providing good biographical books about notable people in our history. When we taught biographies to grade 7s in 2012, we desperately wanted to include a number of Australian choices for the students to write about. However, they were extremely limited in the research they could do – confined to websites and books which were incomplete or written for an adult audience. There’s a fabulous series of biographies for children from the United States – the Who Was . . . series – which tells the story of notable people in an engaging and entertaining fashion. It would be awesome to see Australian writers take on a project like this – and it would be a great way to share people like Georgiana Molloy.
This review originally appeared at Adventures of a Subversive Reader
April 29, 2015
When performing historical fiction, it seems the writer sometimes faces a challenge in drawing the line between just putting in all the brilliant things she read in the heroine's own hand in the letter archives of the State Library, and telling a compelling novel-style story.
In this case, though, Hathorn has pulled off this balancing act pretty well.
Georgiana inhabits this fictional biography, and we can feel her presence in the pages not just as a character, but as a (spoiler alert) formerly living actual human being.
She had the misfortune of having been born a woman when the Western World was still in its Taliban phase, and so she wasn't able to access the giddy heights of scientific recognition she would have today, and Hathorn shows us how that impacts upon her sense of self. It's a thoughtful and even reverential portrait of a quietly noble woman who was handed a raw deal, sentenced as she was to the primary task of pumping out babies until she could pump out no more.
The fact that she happened to notice some wildflowers and treated them with the same respect a sensible person would accord to those lurching prickle bushes so popular back home in Blighty (you know, roses) is a cause for mild amusement rather than admiration in her time. And probably an allegory for how she and women like her were received.
There is a structural problem with telling someone's life story, though: our lives rarely follow the Three Act Structure, or the Hero's Journey, or anything like the basic tropes of normal fiction. We live, stuff goes wrong, we laugh about it, nothing gets resolved, we die.
Who'd read that?
Hathorn has tried to leaven this mundane procession to the grave with a rollicking B Plot of a family trapped beneath the yoke of their ne'er-do-well step-father, exploring in a book that is already examining the suppression of women how a violent and abusive co-dependent relationship plays out when just staying alive in the frontier towns is a 50-50 proposition.
In the A Plot, Georgiana is seen to be a fascinating woman, with a sense of inner conflict over who she is and why. Her religious hectoring of people is dealt with in a useful way (yes, I said "useful"), and we get to walk away from this text feeling we have been in the presence of a real person.
Sure, nothing really gets resolved, but that's life.
In this case, though, Hathorn has pulled off this balancing act pretty well.
Georgiana inhabits this fictional biography, and we can feel her presence in the pages not just as a character, but as a (spoiler alert) formerly living actual human being.
She had the misfortune of having been born a woman when the Western World was still in its Taliban phase, and so she wasn't able to access the giddy heights of scientific recognition she would have today, and Hathorn shows us how that impacts upon her sense of self. It's a thoughtful and even reverential portrait of a quietly noble woman who was handed a raw deal, sentenced as she was to the primary task of pumping out babies until she could pump out no more.
The fact that she happened to notice some wildflowers and treated them with the same respect a sensible person would accord to those lurching prickle bushes so popular back home in Blighty (you know, roses) is a cause for mild amusement rather than admiration in her time. And probably an allegory for how she and women like her were received.
There is a structural problem with telling someone's life story, though: our lives rarely follow the Three Act Structure, or the Hero's Journey, or anything like the basic tropes of normal fiction. We live, stuff goes wrong, we laugh about it, nothing gets resolved, we die.
Who'd read that?
Hathorn has tried to leaven this mundane procession to the grave with a rollicking B Plot of a family trapped beneath the yoke of their ne'er-do-well step-father, exploring in a book that is already examining the suppression of women how a violent and abusive co-dependent relationship plays out when just staying alive in the frontier towns is a 50-50 proposition.
In the A Plot, Georgiana is seen to be a fascinating woman, with a sense of inner conflict over who she is and why. Her religious hectoring of people is dealt with in a useful way (yes, I said "useful"), and we get to walk away from this text feeling we have been in the presence of a real person.
Sure, nothing really gets resolved, but that's life.
April 14, 2011
I found this an interesting idea but found the narration a bit dull.
Georgiana is about settlers moving out to the new colony of Western Australia under the assurance that there would definitely be no convicts but there would be lots of land. Oh, and you can kill the natives if you like. Standard fare for early 1800's Australia era.
I really liked hearing about how life would have been at that time and just how tough it would have been moving across the sea to a, relatively, unchartered land. Then there was the threat of the natives who had been hyped up to be the worst savages in the known world. I can't imagine what it would have been like.
As I mentioned above though, the narrative was very straight laced. I'm not sure if it was meant to reflect the age but it took some of the interest out of the book. It was based on a true story but it felt like Hathorn was trying for a narrative that went with the time but it was all in third person so didn't really mesh.
Overall, it was a good read but nothing I would pick up again.
Georgiana is about settlers moving out to the new colony of Western Australia under the assurance that there would definitely be no convicts but there would be lots of land. Oh, and you can kill the natives if you like. Standard fare for early 1800's Australia era.
I really liked hearing about how life would have been at that time and just how tough it would have been moving across the sea to a, relatively, unchartered land. Then there was the threat of the natives who had been hyped up to be the worst savages in the known world. I can't imagine what it would have been like.
As I mentioned above though, the narrative was very straight laced. I'm not sure if it was meant to reflect the age but it took some of the interest out of the book. It was based on a true story but it felt like Hathorn was trying for a narrative that went with the time but it was all in third person so didn't really mesh.
Overall, it was a good read but nothing I would pick up again.
February 19, 2013
In terms of being a quality work of literature I would not place this text in the same caliber as Kate Greenville's The Secret River. However, this text could be a really useful text to study with a class of high school students. I've noticed that Libby does not shy away from big themes issues and problems in her books for young adults. For instance this book contains: non graphic descriptions of domestic violence (including rape & murder) re-imagines scenes that portray the fraught relationship between indigenous people and the European settlers. Whether Peace and Religion are compatible is also a key theme in the book.
A keen lover of flowers, myself, I was hoping to find more descriptions of the actual flowers in the book. I've always been keen to one day to travel to WA to see the wildflowers in bloom. However, it seems there was more of an emphasis on seed-collecting and saving, in terms of botanical classification.
A keen lover of flowers, myself, I was hoping to find more descriptions of the actual flowers in the book. I've always been keen to one day to travel to WA to see the wildflowers in bloom. However, it seems there was more of an emphasis on seed-collecting and saving, in terms of botanical classification.
September 25, 2014
I enjoyed this so much because I was reading the book with a view to adapting the book to screen. Therefore I was engaged on different levels, particular reading more into the words on the page from an expansion of the visual point of view, view. (If you know what I mean...) I still think this would make a wonderful TV Series dramatizing Georgiana's life. Others have documented her achievements but I would love to see this as a drama series, based on the real life of a female pioneer of Western Australia - I'd love to bring her wonderful character to life!
January 1, 2025
I think this is a little gem. It left me feeling angry and sad that a life was taken so soon because contraception and childbirth were still taboo and hardly understood. I am glad people have written about Georgiana so that she gets the recognition she deserves for contributing to the study of botany in Australia.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 29, 2016
I read this book for school and because of this reason it seemed terrible!
March 31, 2014
I thought this book would be boring and dull, but to my surprise, I couldn't put it down!
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews