The popularity of domestic fiction in nineteenth-century Australia has been obscured by the subsequent national literary history of Australia which has stressed 1890s masculinist realist fiction. Acknowledgement of the wide circulation and enthusiasm for evangelical domestic fiction in Australia has been even more belated. This chapter explores the particular combination of evangelical Christian domesticity with Australian fictional domesticity occurring in the popular fiction of Maud Jean Franc [Matilda Jane Evans] (1827–86).

With titles such as Vermont Vale; or Home Pictures in Australia and Marian, or the Light of Someone's Home (1861), Maud Jean Franc's novels deliberately invoke the domestic. They associate domesticity with ideal colonial settlement as well as with proper Christian life. Franc's fiction remained in print, and in circulation in Australia, Britain and North America for seventy years, from 1859 to the 1920s, serialized, regularly reissued, and popular as school and Sunday school prizes. Her novels are settler novels, with a dual purpose of making Australia homelike and attracting settlers to Australia as home. Susan Strehle comments on much later global fiction that ‘[n]ations or homelands have oft en been constructed through narratives of the family, making stories of homeland resemble and reflect stories of home’, and this is true of Franc's fictions. So too is Strehle's accompanying observation that such fictions are aimed at producing a particular kind of female subject, as well as a specific national narrative embedded in or conflated with the domestic narrative.