Long Bay

Set in Sydney in the first decade of the 1900s, Long Bay is based on the true case of a young female abortionist who was convicted of manslaughter and served out her sentence in the newly opened Long Bay Women’s Reformatory – the first of its kind in Australia. The woman, Rebecca Sinclair, was pregnant when she went to prison.

Long Bay looks at how Rebecca became involved in the burgeoning illegal abortion racket in Edwardian-era Sydney and how she was drawn into Donald Sinclair’s underworld. In unadorned prose, it examines the limiting effects of poverty, the mistakes we make for love, and the bond between mother and child.

About the Author

Eleanor Limprecht was born in Washington DC in 1977 and grew up in the United States, Germany and Pakistan. She now lives in Sydney, where she is completing a Doctorate of Creative Arts at UTS. Her first novel, What Was Left, came out in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Her journalism, short stories, essays and poems have appeared in various places, including The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sleepers Almanac and the Review of Australian Fiction. She is currently completing her second novel, a work of historical fiction about a young, pregnant female abortionist convicted of manslaughter and imprisoned in Sydney’s Long Bay Gaol in 1909.