Esther Denison

We received an email from Norway this week, from a woman researching Sergeants. It led me to Adeline Sergeant a novelist and her 'autobiographical' novel Esther Denison, published in 1899. She was the daughter of a Methodist minister and it depicted a bleak impoverished childhood. I continued on through themes reminiscent of Jane Eyre but with ideas of socialism and the changing role of women. We know little of the Sergeant family other than they were chapel people from a small town in Lincolnshire who emigrated to South Australia in 1838. Adeline's father Richard Sergeant was a younger brother of our emigrant farmer. He married the daughter of a Methodist minister, whose brothers became shopkeepers in Geelong in the 1850s. Thomas Sergeant Hall of the next generation was Australia's first native-born palaeontologist, and first cousin of Adeline Sergeant.