These personal aspects of her characters are well described throughout.

The hours of work strained her eyesight, made her body ache her husband drove himself from dawn to dusk as well, but she notes that he sometimes forgot that others did not have his stamina.

For the yellow I used an Indian pigment made by feeding Brahmin cows the leaves of mango trees, then intensifying the colour of the animal’s urine by adding chemicals’ (96). The details of how the work was done, and the ingredients used, remind the reader of how difficult it was: ‘… my powders spilled across the table and I poured in the wrong amounts of water. And the descriptions of her drawing and painting the prepared birds sometimes take the breath away, as with the quetzal, who ‘sported iridescent sheens in its plumage, like silk from China, gossamer and spider’s webs, droplets of water catching the light’ (94). This makes her descriptions of the preparations of the birds in her novel thoroughly convincing, as when Elizabeth is required to prepare the body of a brush turkey for its skeleton to be displayed. The author has researched her material thoroughly, even becoming a volunteer at the Queensland Museum and learning how to prepare ornithological specimens. Ashley, a published poet and scholar in creative writing, has given us a picture of what she imagines Elizabeth to be as a human being and a skilled and dedicated artist, and it is a magnificent achievement. Coxen goes on to become the previously little known wife of John Gould, the famous English ‘birdman’ and naturalist of the nineteenth century. The reader quickly realises she is a singular figure, a woman of warmth, sympathy, artistic ambition, intelligence. This passage, early in this first novel by Melissa Ashley, displays Elizabeth Coxen’s keen imagination, sensitivity, and observational skills. The darter had drawn his long neck into a loop. The curlew held a shell in the barber’s tongs of its beak.

But as I drew closer I could see that the birds were perched on wooden boards, each miming its own dramatic scene. It seemed the birds had flown into the room via a secret passage and, like children, settled before the warmth of the flames in the hope of being treated to a story. For a heart-stopping moment the display tricked my eyes. I drifted towards the back of the workshop, my attention caught by a menagerie of shorebirds – a godwit, several sandpipers, curlews, dotterels, herons and varities of plover.

The Birdman's Wife by Melissa Ashley