Caroline Woolmer Leakey's writings are primarily important for three reasons: her novel The Broad Arrow: Being Passages from the History of Maida Gwynnham, a Lifer (1859) is an early example of convict literature and the earliest with a woman as protagonist; the archive of her writings exemplifies the difficulties of tracking the work of an author, especially a woman, outside the traditional literary canon; and the relationship between her life and her writing raises critical questions about the terms in which that relationship may be analyzed. Leakey's writing, then, engages textual, historical, and theoretical discourses, and in each case the effects are interrogative and provocative. Assessing the writing is not so much a matter of calibrating an agreed position within the corpus of women's writing as an opportunity for discovering the limitations and provisionality of both historical record and the canon-making process. This analysis does not suggest that Leakey's...