At one point in A War for Gentlemen, a school-teacher is reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin to her class in rural New South Wales in 1872. Seven-year-old Annie Fitzhenry excitedly announces that her father had fought for the North during the US Civil War. When the teacher subsequently visits Annie’s home, both she and the child are abruptly undeceived. Charles Fitzhenry is indeed a veteran of that war, but had served in the Confederate army.

Harriet Beecher Slowe forcefully argued that the disintegration of the families of slaves was perhaps the most pernicious aspect of slavery. In French’s novel, it is racial prejudice that separates parents, children and siblings – tragically, because entirely unnecessarily.

Annie’s mistake is not the only fiction-inspired error in A War for Gentlemen. At eighteen, Charles Fitzhenry. son of a prosperous land-owner. already has a firm idea of what battle will be like. based on his reading of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, regimental histories and newspapers. Believing in the right of the Southern states to secede, and wanting to be a hero, he travels from Sydney to the estate of his great-uncle in Carolina.