The black pearl

About the book

Jeanne leaves her Parisian school for her guardian's South Australian station, Gwylata, where unfamiliar domestic arrangements and religious expectations immediately challenge her lively temperament. On her eighteenth birthday she receives a black pearl connected with the family's story of an Indian ancestress. The jewel gives questions of inheritance and identity an imaginative presence as she encounters affection, attraction, and competing ideas of duty. Her account combines station life and personal relationships with an increasingly explicit spiritual search. The novel's theosophical interests shape its treatment of successive lives and moral development, while colonial attitudes influence its descriptions of ancestry and place. Jeanne's first-person voice holds these strands together as she tries to understand which forms of guidance answer her own needs and convictions.

• Spiritual searching
• Love and conscience
• Inheritance and identity

Why read it

The Australian setting and theosophical concerns give Jeanne's coming-of-age story an unusual combination of social and spiritual pressures.

English translation by Maude Wholohan; 1911 George Robertson edition, published under Noel Aimir