An Irresistible Temptation: The true story of Jane New and a colonial scandal

Abstract

In literature as in life there are true stories and there are "true" stories. A current trend is the style known as "faction": creating a vivid story by interweaving fictionalised dialogue and description into a story about real people and events. The drawback for the reader is the uncertainty as to where fact ends and fiction begins; depending upon the author this can be anywhere along a wide spectrum. 'An Irresistible Temptation' is neither fiction nor faction; the characters, events and dialogue are all drawn from the wealth of records relating to the Jane New scandal. To generate a sense of immediacy, a feeling that the characters were living their own story rather than a narrator observing them, I used information from court testimonies, affidavits, letters, reports and newspaper articles to describe events as they happened, and I converted recollections into speech. Conversions were not always straightforward: words, phrases, sentences and even paragraphs sometimes had to be omitted, or words added, or the arrangement tweaked slightly for ease of comprehension.