Mary Helena Fortune (née Wilson; 29 July 1832 – 9 November 1911) was an Australian author and journalist who was one of the earliest female writers of detective fiction. A prolific pseudonymous writer of fiction, poetry, and journalism, she contributed chiefly to The Australian Journal. Her best-known work, The Detective's Album, comprised more than 500 short stories published in the journal between 1868 and 1908. Fortune's writing was characterised by an unsparing portrayal of colonial society and urban Melbourne, incorporating the prevalence of violence and the mistreatment of women.
Born in Ireland, Fortune moved to Canada as a child and travelled to Australia with her son in 1855, possibly to escape her marriage. She lived in the goldfields settlements that emerged during the Australian gold rushes, where she had another child, entered a short-lived bigamous marriage with a policeman, and may have traded in illegal alcohol. Her early writings, including radical poetry, appeared in local goldfields newspapers. Following the establishment of The Australian Journal in 1865, she became a frequent and longstanding contributor.
Although best known for her short crime fiction, Fortune also wrote serial novels, poetry, journalism, a memoir, and at least one play. Her work extended beyond crime fiction and included romance, Gothic fiction, and ghost stories. Drawing on her experiences in the goldfields and in Melbourne's rapidly urbanising environment, her writing often criticised colonial society—particularly the treatment of women—and examined the failure of police to address sexual violence and other crimes against women.
Despite enjoying popularity as a writer, Fortune experienced poverty and periods of homelessness during later life. She sufferred alcoholism and her surviving son, George Fortune, spent more than 20 years in prison. Fortune died in 1911 shortly after leaving an asylum for the destitute. Knowledge of the connection between her identity and the pseudonyms she wrote under was nearly lost after her death, but was reestablished in the 1950s by bookcollector John Kinmont Moir. Since the 1980s, through the work of historian Lucy Sussex and others, the significance of Fortune's contributions have become more widely recognised.
Mary Helena Fortune was born Mary Wilson on 29 July 1832 in Carrickfergus near Belfast, Ireland, into a family of Scottish origin. Her mother Eleanor (née Atkinson) died less than six months after her birth. She moved to Montreal, Canada, as a child with her father, a civil engineer named George Wilson. Based on her later writings, Mary and her father may have left Ireland around 1846 during the early years of the Great Famine of Ireland. While nothing is known about Mary's education, historians believe that her writing indicates she was well-educated.
Mary married a surveyor named Joseph Fortune on 25 March 1851 and had one son, Joseph George, in Canada. In 1855 she moved with her son to Australia to join her father, who had moved to the goldfields settlements that had emerged amid the Australian gold rushes. The historian Lucy Sussex speculates that Fortune likely fled Canada with her son to escape her marriage, knowing that Quebec's legal code at the time would have almost certainly granted custody of her child to his father in the case of a separation or divorce.
Fortune arrived in Australia with her son on 4 October 1855. The day after her arrival, Fortune placed an advertisement in a local newspaper to inform her father of her arrival. According to one of her later pieces of autobiographical writing, Fortune eventually managed to make contact with her father and learned that he had opened a store at Kangaroo Flat near Castlemaine. She travelled to meet him on a Cobb & Co coach. Kangaroo Flat, located near Mount Alexander, was a bustling goldfields settlement where Fortune's tent also served as the town's general store. The goldfields were rife with crime, substance abuse, and sexual violence—themes that would later feature prominently in much of Fortune's writing.
In 1856 Fortune and her father moved their store to the town of Buninyong near Ballarat. In November that year, Fortune had another son, Eastbourne Vaudrey (known as George). She claimed on the birth certificate that her husband Joseph Fortune was the father; historians believe that this is unlikely, as there is no record of Joseph Fortune ever being present in Australia prior to his death in Canada in 1861. According to her memoir, soon after the birth Fortune moved north to Chinaman's Flat near Maryborough. Sometime before the middle of 1857 she moved to her final goldfields residence in the nearby town of Kingower. Sussex believes that Fortune may have begun to sell illegal alcohol on the goldfields during this period. In January 1858 Mary's elder son died of "convulsions" (likely meningitis). She married an Irish-born mounted constable named Percy Rollo Brett in October of that year in Dunolly, claiming on the marriage certificate that she was a widow. Her marriage to Brett was not a success, and he soon moved to New South Wales where he later married another woman.
Fortune published her first pieces of writing under the initials "M. H. F." in local newspapers in 1855. In December 1855 she wrote a poem, "Song of the Gold Diggers", which was first published in the Mount Alexander Mail and then reprinted in other newspapers. The poem expressed Fortune's radical political sentiments and her sympathies for the cause of the Eureka Stockade rebels. She was offered a job at the Mount Alexander Mail in 1855, but the offer was withdrawn when it was discovered that "M. H. F." was in fact a woman with a young child.
Fortune began writing for the newly founded Australian Journal in 1865 and soon adopted the pen name "Waif Wander". The Australian Journal was a weekly magazine that borrowed from the design and business model of the successful London Journal. It attempted to attract readers by featuring locally written fiction. Fortune's first contribution to the journal, a poem addressed to her son, appeared in its second issue. In subsequent issues Fortune would contribute additional poems, a fictional memoir of her life in the goldfields, and her first work of detective fiction—a short story titled "The Stolen Specimens". Sussex believes that this was likely the world's first work of fiction written by a woman from the perspective of a detective. In November 1865 The Australian Journal announced that it would be publishing a series of crime stories by Fortune and the writer James Skipp Borlase. Fortune wrote a number of short crime stories for the journal as part of the series, including one of her best-known stories, "The Dead Witness". Borlase, a serial plagiarist, was credited as the author of several pieces in the series that are now believed to have been written partially or wholly by Fortune.
In 1866 and the early months of 1867, Fortune published four serial novels in The Australian Journal under her pen name "Waif Wander". By the following year Fortune is known to have been living on a farm in Oxley, and began to write short crime stories under the initials "W. W.". Most of Fortune's detective writing would continue to be published under these initials; Fortune's biographers Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown have suggested that this may have been to create a separation between the feminised novels of "Waif Wander" and the more masculine crime writing of "W. W.". One of these early short stories, "The White Maniac: A Doctor's Story", would become Fortune's most reprinted work. The story is a work of Gothic horror that recounts the story of a woman whose family confines her in an environment devoid of any colour when it is discovered that seeing anything but white causes her to become violent and homicidal.
In 1868 Fortune moved to Melbourne. She wrote an account of her journey titled "Fourteen Days on the Roads" for The Australian Journal describing her observations of colonial society during the journey. That year she also began writing her longest-running and best-known work, The Detective's Album, a series of crime stories published in The Australian Journal over the course of the next forty years. In Melbourne, Fortune also began to write "panoramic" journalism about her observations of the urban environment.