She attempts to salvage him while confirming her own sensuality. Ellen, dropping a stillborn child, stripped to her wedding ring, drapes herself with the fringes of leaves of the title and witnesses appalling atavism until a convict helps her escape to the safety she hopes will be theirs. On the return, the ship hits a reef and Austin, clutching his Virgil rather than Ellen, reaches land only to be savaged by natives. But Ellen dutifully attends him, anxious to ""please and protect"" him all the way to Australia where they go to visit his hotter-blooded brother who seduces her and leaves her pregnant. Ellen is a docile if crude Cornish farm girl elevated to the drawing room by her marriage to Austin, an older man who enjoyed poor health and whose ""glossy whiskers, fastidious hands"" rarely made importunate demands on her.
Here the disastrous experiences of Eliza Fraser-a dubious heroine who ended up expoiting her travail-have been merged with the story of one Ellen Roxburgh and interpreted with far greater humanity. Fraser on the Fatal Shore, by Michael Alexander (1971).
Some, surely not many, will remember the dire fascinator Mrs.
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