Jessica

Jessica is Bryce Courtenay's 1998 novel, based loosely on a real early-twentieth-century case, set in the harsh farming country of rural Australia in the years leading up to World War I. Jessica Bergman is raised as the son her father never had, toughened by farm work, while her sister Meg is steered by their mother toward marrying Jack Thomas, the district's wealthiest bachelor.

The novel turns on Jessica's friendship with a local boy left intellectually disabled after a head injury and cruelly nicknamed by the town. When he kills members of a family who have tormented him, Jessica travels alone across dangerous country to get him to a courthouse, determined that he receive a fair trial rather than mob justice. Her growing closeness with Jack complicates matters further once Meg manipulates her way into marrying him.

Jessica's own pregnancy, whose father she will not name, brings suspicion, family betrayal, and institutionalization down on her. Courtenay builds the novel around themes of rural gender roles, class, disability, and the human cost of a small community's rush to judgment, drawing its emotional force from the historical case that inspired it.