Rosetta: A Scandalous True Story
ALEXANDRA JOEL
VINTAGE, $34.99
The colonies of England provided perfect opportunities for people who yearned to reinvent themselves. In the late 19th century, for example, teenager Eugenia Falleni changed her gender to male simply by altering her name, clothes and gestures, and managed to marry a beautiful young widow; at the same time, a penniless 30-year-old Polish woman named Chaja, who knew no English, migrated to Australia and recreated herself as cosmetics queen Helena Rubinstein; meanwhile, in 1911, a Eurasian baby born in Bombay, India, christened Estelle Thompson, would grow up to change her name and mixed-race origins in an effort to become the Hollywood film star Merle Oberon.
With the publication of Rosetta: A Scandalous True Story, Rosetta Raphael joins the chorus of young colonial women who thrived as a consequence of identity alteration. Written by her great-granddaughter, Alexandra Joel, this fictionalised biography begins in Melbourne in 1899, with the marriage between 18-year-old virgin Rosetta and her respectable older beau, Louis. 
On their wedding night, Louis brutally rapes his bride, providing her with a shocking example of what she could expect in the bedroom for the rest of their wedded life. Her husband's behaviour, and the results of it - a daughter - repulse her so much that she finds comfort in the arms of another man, a half-Chinese fortune-teller and watercolour artist.
By the time he falls in love with Rosetta, the other man is already a master of reinvention. The son of a Chinese goldfield immigrant and an illiterate Australian girl, William Norman was born in 1875 in the small NSW town of Tuena. As a young man, however, he adopted the name Carl Zeno and moved to Melbourne, opening a business in Carlton as a healer, herbalist, and hypnotist.
After securing a highly controversial divorce, Rosetta marries Zeno and they shift to Sydney, where her husband reinvents himself yet again as a magician, Zeno the Magnificent, performing nightly shows at the fairground, Wonderland, on Tamarama Beach, with Rosetta sometimes assisting.
When Wonderland begins to lose its sparkle, the couple decide to reinvent themselves yet again with a move back to the motherland: Zeno as a Japanese medical doctor, and Rosetta as an American three years younger than her actual age. The two were keenly aware that the craze for all things Japanese was sweeping through London at the time, and that a woman from a former convict colony would be treated with disdain.
After publishing a fraudulent medical pamphlet extolling the health benefits of radium, Dr Zeno quickly attracts the patronage of bored, aristocratic women eager for attention, in the form of receiving aromatherapy, herbal tinctures, fortune-telling, or massage - the latter often leading to sexual satiation.
Ever the grifter, Rosetta not only accepts the lucrative arrangement, but actively encourages it, happy to befriend the parade of European princesses and duchesses circling through their premises. Zeno also distinguishes himself as a seer, and high-ranking authorities grow increasingly dependent on his uncanny, yet accurate, predictions.
The couple accumulates much wealth and many rich and influential friends, including Lady Lillian Packenham, a lonely and neglected wife, who eventually forms a menage a trois with Rosetta and Zeno. Like Rosetta years before, Lillian too leaves her husband and children for a more enriching life, following the couple to Australia just before the outbreak of World War I. To maintain propriety, Lillian moves into an apartment only a short walk away from where her lovers live.
The structure of Rosetta is tight and compelling, with chapters alternating between the author's search for facts about her elusive great-grandmother, and ones that fictionalise the facts into scenes. It is in the latter category that the prose occasionally falters; in an effort to create historical "atmosphere" the narrative relies too heavily on tired adjectives and tautologies, and could have benefited from a stronger editorial hand. This quibble, however, is unlikely to bother most readers.
Rosetta is a fine example of how easy it was to reinvent oneself in the wild west of the colonies. The book has the pace of a thriller, the mystery of a whodunnit and - lest the reader be tempted to read it as pure fiction - a section of striking black and white photos of the main characters in their various poses and masquerades.
Mandy Sayer's most recent book is The Poet's Wife: A Memoir (Allen & Unwin).