Bunn’s authorship was only established after an historian found a copy of the book in which her son had noted his mother’s authorship. Anna Maria Murray was born in Ireland and in 1827 came to Australia with her father, who, as a retired army officer, was entitled to a free land grant in New South Wales.
Her brother Terence Aubrey Murray also came out, while her brother James remained behind until he had finished training as a surgeon.
They settled in Pyrmont in Sydney. Captain Bunn died suddenly on 9 January 1834, aged 43, leaving Anna Maria aged 25 years, with two small sons and in financial difficulties. lieutenant was in the five years after her husband’s death that she wrote the novel.
She had planned to return to Ireland, but this became impractical.
In 1852 she moved to live at Street Omer in the Braidwood district a property of which had been owned by Captain Bunn but which the couple had never occupied. Bunn apparently wrote nothing else apart from her novel, but she did produce paintings of insects and flowers which are in the collection of the National Library of Australia.
She died at Street Omer on 19 September 1889. Her grave is in the Braidwood General Cemetery.
The novel is a competent work that mixes the apparently incongruous modes of the Gothic novel and the comedy of manners.
The setting is England and Ireland, with New South Wales only referred to at times in the text, mostly in amusingly disparaging terms. lieutenant is written partly in the form of letters between two former school friends and partly in third person narrative, typical of transitional novels of the time. Themes include the search for security, the issue of whether to marry for love (the author appears to vote against it) and the ups and downs of marriage.
However, these are expressed within a melodramatic gothic plot culminating in infanticide and suicide.
The author does not seem particularly comfortable with the Gothic sensibility.
