Georg Forster and Theresa Huber's Adventures on a Journey to New Holland

There has been relatively little work done on Therese Huber (1764–1829) in comparison to her famous first husband, Georg Forster (1754–1794). Early attention to Huber typically focused on her failings: her betrayal of Forster, both as a wife and as a keeper of his letters, her inadequacy as an accurate reporter of the early history of Britain’s new colony at Botany Bay, and her limitations as a writer of any note. Although recent readings have been more generous, identifying her efforts as apiece with the strategies employed by many female authors during a period of women’s political and social repression, there are in fact only a handful of them. In this short contribution I highlight the manner in which Huber’s first novella, An Adventure to New Holland (1793), positions its female protagonist as a person forced to navigate male power while maintaining a spirit of defiant resistance reminiscent of Forster’s description of the French Revolutionary Charlotte Corday. Huber’s brief Coda to her novella, The Lonely Deathbed (1810), imagines a happy ending for Forster, but serves at the same time as a reminder of the centrality of India to the geopolitics of the time. Stephen Gaukroger’s attention to this aspect of the discussion provides the backdrop for my analysis of Forster and Huber.