The Birdman’s Wife

Melissa Ashley

Format
Hardback
Publisher
Affirm Press
Country
Australia
Published
3 July 2017
Pages
400
ISBN
9781925344998

The Birdman’s Wife

Melissa Ashley

A woman overshadowed by history steps back into the light …

Artist Elizabeth Gould spent her life capturing the sublime beauty of birds the world had never seen before. But her legacy was eclipsed by the fame of her husband, John Gould. The Birdman’s Wife at last gives voice to a passionate and adventurous spirit who was so much more than the woman behind the man.

Elizabeth was a woman ahead of her time, juggling the demands of her artistic life with her roles as wife, lover, helpmate, and mother to an ever-growing brood of children. In a golden age of discovery, her artistry breathed wondrous life into hundreds of exotic new species, including Charles Darwin’s famous Galapagos finches.

In The Birdman’s Wife, the naïve young girl who falls in love with a demanding and ambitious genius comes into her own as a woman, an artist and a bold adventurer who defies convention by embarking on a trailblazing expedition to collect and illustrate Australia’s ‘curious' birdlife.

In this indelible portrait, an extraordinary woman overshadowed by history steps back into the light where she belongs.

Review

by Annie Condon

The Birdman’s Wife is a novel that will appeal to bird fanciers and devotees of John Gould’s monographs. The story is told from the perspective of Gould’s wife, Elizabeth, and begins in 1828 when she is twenty-four, and meets Gould for the first time. At this stage Gould is working as a taxidermist, though once the couple marries, he decides to specialise in the classification of species.

Ashley has painstakingly researched Elizabeth’s life and world, and this is evident in her detailed narrative. She has also brought to the forefront Elizabeth’s art, and the essential but largely unrecognised role Elizabeth played in her husband’s success. Bringing a modern, feminist perspective to her examination of Elizabeth’s life, Ashley explores the conflict Elizabeth feels in attempting to balance the roles of mother, wife and artist. This is most evident when John asks Elizabeth to come with him to Australia in 1838 to document species in the new land. She is torn between the needs of her children, the two youngest of whom would remain at home in England, and the exciting opportunity for her husband. She chooses to go for the two years, but is constantly aware of her distance from her two girls; a distance made even more fraught when she receives a letter from home telling of her youngest daughter’s illness.

Ashley has created a beautifully written book, and I had no trouble believing it was narrated by a figure from the 1800s. It is a wonderful, fictional biography of an exceptional woman whose life is best summarised by Ashley’s own words: My husband loved me and had done well for us. We might make something of our union. And so I came to my decision: to keep his house, to be mother to his children. To sketch the feathered tribes that obsessed his mind.

Annie Condon is a bookseller at Readings Hawthorn.

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