This novel is far more than the fictionalised life of natural history artist Elizabeth Gould. It is also an insight into English and Australian – particularly Tasmanian – history in the last 1830s. And it is about the second-class status of women. 


Elizabeth Gould was the wife of famous zoologist John Gould. He's known for his book The Birds of Australia, the first volumes of which she illustrated.


She refused to fit the mould expected of women at the time. She balanced being a mother, wife, lover and artist. In 1838 Elizabeth, John, their eldest child, seven-year-old Henry, and others left England for Australia for two years. She left behind her other three children in the car of her mother and a friend.

The chapters about Elizabeth’s time in Australia provide a vivid picture of what life was like. Elizabeth befriended Lady Jane Franklin, wife of the Governor of Van Dieman’s Land, John Franklin. Lady Jane was also an unconventional woman who refused to play a subservient role.

There’s a lot of information here for bird lovers; an academic’s research is evident. The prose though is anything but academic. Melissa Ashley has written an interesting and engaging novel. It will inform you about Australia’s history and a woman who was far more than her husband’s support act.
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Women in the 1830s had such a difficult life - even if they had servants and Elizabeth did there was still the dangers of childbirth. So sad she died young - her bird illustrations are amazing. ( )

I wanted to like this novel with its gorgeous cover and superb design, but contrary to my expectations, I made rather heavy weather of The Birdman’s Wife. It’s been shortlisted for the General Fiction Book of the Year in the ABIA awards, it sounded rather interesting, and it’s had good reviews, but…

The Birdman’s Wife is written in a genre that I’ve christened Rescue-A-Woman-From-Oblivion. These women have larger-than-life husbands whose fame so overwhelms them that we know next to nothing about them. Germaine Greer did it best with Shakespeare’s Wife (see my review) and Glenda Korporaal did it not quite so successfully with Making Magic, the Marion Mahoney Griffin Story (see my review). It’s a difficult task for an author to undertake because, by definition, these women whose lives were overshadowed by their husbands have very little presence in the historical record.

Well, Melissa Ashley became fascinated by the wife of the famous ornithologist John Gould, and despite the frustrations of disappointing archives, her PhD became this novel, the fictionalised life of Elizabeth Gould, one of the artists who illustrated his magnificent monographs about birds of the world.

But IMO it’s much too long. It’s nearly 400 pages and a lot of it is repetitive. Yes, we learn about how Elizabeth Gould met and fell in love with John Gould, and how she mastered the skills to illustrate his wonderful books about birds. We learn about her growing family, the historically significant people that she meets, the death of two of her children, her anguish about leaving her children to travel with Gould to Australia, and her experiences in Hobart and country NSW in the late 1830s.

But there’s an awful lot about killing birds, the disgusting business of eviscerating them, stuffing them and stitching them back together again, arranging them in cabinets and finally painting them. We hear about the mess, and the smell, and we hear about it a lot. There’s a fair bit about childbirth as well, for each of the eight children that Elizabeth bore. Yes, there’s a great deal of detail about a woman who only lived to be 37, and IMO at times the temptation to include all the PhD research and the author’s experiences as a volunteer taxidermist should have been resisted.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/05/04/the-birdmans-wife-by-melissa-ashley/ ( )