About this ebook
Starting with the love affair between the Estonian Baroness Amalie Christine and her doctor, Ferdinand Jencken – and their elopement - the story is built from personal diaries, letters and memoirs. They describe not only the perils and set backs, but also astonishing changes of fortunes, including their rescue by a complete stranger, who becomes the family’s benefactor.
Spanning three generations, readers have a ring-side seat to the spiritualism movement of the nineteenth century, the hardships of life in colonial Sydney, the world of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ and its attendant economic crash, the perils of sea travel and the many small, personal distresses that family life brings. The Banolians is frequently stranger than fiction, as life so often is.
