"Caroline Kearney faced a heartbreaking dilemma. In Melbourne, Australia, 1865, Caroline became a thirty-one-year-old widow and mother of six. Her husband's will, which she hoped would include legal rights to his sheep station, demanded something else entirely: to receive any money, Caroline would have to leave Australia and live in a house of her brothers-in-law's choosing in Ireland - a nation she had never visited. Her husband and his family - unlike her - were Catholic. Pieced together from evidence in archives, newspapers, genealogical sites, and legal records, Caroline's Dilemma sheds new light on colonial gender relationships and family lives of the nineteenth century. Investigating women's property rights, migration, settler colonialism, the Irish diaspora, and sectarian conflict, it reveals how one middle-class woman and her family fought to shape their own lives within the British Empire."-- Provided by publisher.