Brisbane author Susanna de Vries has a new book, Females on the Fatal Shore, just out which has a number of elements that could be taken as a re-telling of the Lady Diana Spencer story. In this case, however, the book is set in 19th-century rural Queensland, and is just one of the stories featured. The author spoke to Fiona Purdon of "The Courier-Mail".
"It's an era of aristocrats, it's a very structured society, the Georgian society, and Stephen [Lamprell Spencer] did the unforgivable: He married a seamstress and he became seriously religious," de Vries says.
"He wanted to make a lot of money in Australia and then go back to England and show his family he had made good.
"But he bought too many cattle runs and then suffered depression. Australian history is full of boom and bust stories."
