Linda Jaivin's new novel, A Most Immoral Woman focuses on an obsessive sexual relationship which great Australian overlander and China correspondent George Ernest Morrison had in 1904 with the much younger Mae Ruth Perkins, who was commonly described as an 'American nymphomaniac heiress'. Morrison called Mae one of the most immoral women he ever met, yet he was clearly both smitten and unsettled by her. Jaivin talks about the process of imaginatively recreating this episode in the private life of a very public man from a very different era to our own, and the fascinating historical material unearthed in the process.
ANU, Canberra, March 2009
(Part 1 of 2)