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Eleanor Limprecht

Long Bay Kindle Edition

by Eleanor Limprecht (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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It’s Sydney, 1909. A woman dies when Rebecca Sinclair performs an abortion. The verdict sends Rebecca to the Long Bay Women’s Penitentiary—just opened—for three years. Complicating the situation still further—Rebecca herself is pregnant.

Inspired by letters found in an archive and a photograph of a young woman prisoner, Long Bay is a compelling, moving novel that reveals the harsh realities of living in poverty—and falling in love.

‘Long Bay is that rare thing: a historical novel untainted by sentimentality, with a story not only fascinating in the context of its time, but made relevant to our modern world.’ — Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

First published in 2015, it went out of print with the closure of its original publisher, Sleepers Publishing.

Eleanor Limprecht is an essayist, short story writer, reviewer and novelist. She is the author of What Was Left (2013), also in the Untapped Collection; Long Bay (2015) and The Passengers (2018). Her new novel, The Coast, will be published in 2022. For more information visit www.eleanorlimprecht.com

Print length

287 pages
Language

English
Publication date

3 December 2021
File size

2750 KB
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About the Author

Eleanor Limprecht was born in Washington DC in 1977 and grew up in the United States, Germany and Pakistan. She now lives in Sydney, where she is studying for a Doctorate of Creative Arts at UTS. Her journalism and book reviews have appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian and The Sun-Herald. Her first novel, What Was Left, was published by Sleepers in 2013 to much critical acclaim, and shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal 2014. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09N115MDB
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ligature (3 December 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2750 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 287 pages

Best Sellers Rank: 167,671 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 10,281 in Contemporary Fiction (Kindle Store)
- 64,281 in Genre Fiction (Books)

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Eleanor Limprecht

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Eleanor Limprecht is the author of three novels: The Passengers (Allen & Unwin, 2018), Long Bay (Sleepers Publishing, 2015) and What Was Left (Sleepers Publishing, 2013, shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal). Her fourth novel, The Coast, is due out in 2022. Her short fiction and essays have been published various places including Best Australian Stories, Sydney Noir, Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings and Choice Words.

Eleanor Limprecht
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Eleanor Limprecht
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Bookworm

A commendable depiction of an Australia-past.

Reviewed in Australia on 20 September 2015

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A bit gut-wrenching one way and another. Such times they were, and this author deserves commendation for her depiction of the environment that existed in an inner-city capital city - an environment that no doubt existed in many an Australian city of the times. I'm glad this book was written, and I'm glad I read it.

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Amazon Customer

A glimpse of Sydney past.

Reviewed in Australia on 12 December 2015

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Honest, historic and insightful.
An enjoyable read as the characters felt authentic. Life is confusing in the 21st century, and certainly was in the 1800s.

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Sharen Claydon

I found this a good read. Great characters and hard to put down

Reviewed in Australia on 8 September 2015

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I found this a good read. Great characters and hard to put down

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‘Her first memories are fragments, scraps of fabric pieced together to make a whole.’

Reviewed in Australia on 28 January 2016

This novel starts with a letter from the Prison Comptroller to the Royal Hospital for Women in Sydney. This letter, the inspiration for Ms Limprecht’s novel, advises the Hospital of the arrangements to be made for the admission of Rebecca Sinclair for the birth of her child. After the letter, in a prologue Rebecca’s admission to the hospital is described, and then her labour begins.

‘Tell him we have the upper hand and we could let the whole world know.’

With Chapter One, the novel returns to Rebecca’s childhood and the novel progresses chronologically. At this stage, I am hooked. Who is Rebecca Sinclair? Why is she in prison? And the baby? Slowly, the story unfolds. Rebecca lives with her widowed mother and sisters and they take in piece work in order to exist. Rebecca works hard, and then harder as her sisters leave home and her mother’s failing eyesight renders her incapable of finer needlework. Then, one day, she meets Donald Sinclair. Donald is the only son of Nurse Sinclair, an abortionist with a thriving trade in inner Sydney in the early twentieth century. Rebecca falls for Donald, but slowly becomes aware that he is not to be trusted. Donald likes money, but only the spending rather than the earning of it.

‘In this reflection she sees nothing of the girl with the blue silk, nothing of the young woman who read books and dreamt of finer things.’

Rebecca works with Donald’s mother for a while, but then Rebecca and Donald set up on their own. A woman dies, and Rebecca and Donald are charged with manslaughter. Rebecca’s story ends with her release from gaol.

Some novelizations of true stories do not work, sometimes the facts constrain the story. That wasn’t the case for me in this novel. I thought that Ms Limprecht imagined Rebecca’s life and challenges well. From the hardship faced by her mother, widowed with six children, to the role played by those willing to undertake abortions and the risks faced by those who underwent them, the story rang true for me. Perhaps Rebecca should have made different choices, certainly she seemed naïve and gullible at times. But what other options did she have? Leaving Donald had its own challenges.

‘The body, as we age, is like a map, she thinks – a map to read with my hands.’

I enjoyed this novel: it challenged me and made me think about some of the challenges of life for the poor, specifically for poor women, early last century.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

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Shelleyrae

A thoughtful and readable novel,

Reviewed in Australia on 17 August 2015

Drawing on official documents and extensive general research into the period, author Eleanor Limprecht blends fact and imagination to create a convincing narrative that tells the story of a woman forgotten by history in her novel, 'Long Bay'.

Born in Paddington, New South Wales in 1885, Rebecca Sinclair was the fourth of six children, raised by her mother who was widowed when Rebecca was two. She married at nineteen, birthed a daughter, and four years later, alongside her husband, was convicted of manslaughter for the death of a mother of three who died after an abortion procedure performed by Rebecca went wrong. Rebecca was sentenced to three years hard labour in Long Bay and while imprisoned, Rebecca birthed her second daughter.

Limprecht builds on these known details of Rebecca's life with her imagination, informed by research, creating a story that depicts a childhood of poverty, a marriage marred by bigamy and violence and the events that led up to the tragic event that resulted in her being jailed. Long Bay illustrates an era where women had limited control over their lives and often struggled under the weight of deprivation and hardship.

There is no doubt that Rebecca's story is fascinating and I was intrigued by the details of her life, but the writing is often quite dry and unsentimental, lacking the emotion that could have breathed more vitality into the narrative. Yet the story is rich in period detail, evoking the city landscape and era well.

A thoughtful and readable novel, I did enjoy Long Bay. I feel it is a story that will interest readers of both historical fiction and non fiction, especially those curious about women's lives and issues at the turn of the century.

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Top reviews from other countries

Amazon Customer

interesting

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 August 2015

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Really interesting read. Could not put it down.

Dell Brand

A very readable book outlining a little explored part of ...

Reviewed in the United States on 5 February 2016

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A very readable book outlining a little explored part of Sydney's history. The main character asks for and receives the reader's empathy.

Carol Buckley

It was an interesting read and shed some light on what it must have been like in the early days

Reviewed in the United States on 31 August 2015

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I read this book because I was interested in the history of Long Bay. It was an interesting read and shed some light on what it must have been like in the early days.

One person found this helpful

Valerie Fox

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States on 20 November 2015

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good historical read

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Long Bay Kindle Edition

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Eleanor Limprecht

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