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fiction

When I read Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations in high school, I had no idea my family tree included a Magwitch or two. My father was a fifth-generation Australian. When I took up the family research I found details about my 3rd great grandmother, Sarah Morris. At age 27, she was convicted of stealing cloth from a draper’s shop and sentenced to seven years. She and her infant daughter spent eight months in London’s notorious Newgate Prison before being shipped with ninety other women to what was then Port Jackson (now Sydney), a voyage that took over four months. The more I learn of her life, the more compelled I feel to tell her story in The Cottage of Content.