This errant lady

Plot

Jane Franklin's visit to Sydney in 1839 took place at a time when she was just emerging on to the historical stage, and attracting more public interest than any governor's wife in Australia before or since. Had she acquired no greater fame, her diary of the visit might not have survived. Yet the diary of her travels overland, now held in the Collection of the National Library of Australia, is a dazzling display of the paradoxes of nineteenth-century femininity by a woman who lived them - a sustained testament to the enormous contradiction of being, at that time, both a lady and a clever, energetic woman.