This distinctive take on the Gothic novel is “a glorious female revenge fantasy.”

Mary Fortune is now widely acknowledged as a pioneer in the field of crime fiction, whose stories offer a vivid account of life and death in colonial-era Australia. She tackled subjects like murder, armed robbery, and sexual violence with a frankness unprecedented for a woman in the nineteenth century, in styles ranging from melodrama to social realism and what is now called noir.

Fortune’s detective stories—like those of Edgar Allan Poe—often have an undercurrent of horror running through them, reflecting the influence of the Gothic tradition from Ann Radcliffe to Mary Elizabeth Braddon. So it’s no surprise that Fortune made an original contribution of her own to the horror genre with Clyzia, which has been called “a late and extreme flowering of the Gothic.” Serialized in 1866 in the mass-circulation Australian Journal, astonishingly it has never before been published in book form.

When dissolute aristocrat Chatham Adderfield seduces Calista Heckstone, daughter of Zela, “Queen of the Gipsies,” then betrays her to marry a woman of property, a narrative of corruption and revenge is unleashed that will enmesh three families and blight their lives down through the generations. After Calista dies in childbirth, her daughter Clyzia is groomed by Zela to be the instrument of the family’s vengeance. Physically infirm, but skilled in alchemy and magic, Clyzia is hell-bent on the destruction of the Adderfield clan.

Fortune uses figures and tropes of the Gothic novel—the occult, women in jeopardy, madness and delirium, the past haunting the present—to illuminate the devastation wreaked on women’s lives in a world defined by patriarchal power and class privilege, but also to show how women themselves are warped by this world—if they are not to become helpless victims, must they be pitiless killers?