Rosa Campbell Praed

Rosa Campbell Praed (ca.1895)

Rosa Campbell Praed (born March 27, 1851 in Bromelton , Queensland , † April 10, 1935 in Torquay , Devon ) was an Australian writer with British roots.

Life

Youth and family

Praed was a daughter of the English immigrant Thomas Murray-Prior (1819-1892) and his first wife Mathilda Harpur. She grew up in the Scenic Rim region , where her father oversaw several post offices. Her grandmother taught her to read and write because her remote place of residence barely gave her the opportunity to attend school regularly.

As a guest of her father, she made the acquaintance of Arthur Campbell Praed, a nephew of the poet Winthrop Mackworth Praed . On October 29, 1872 she married Arthur Praed and had four children with him: Maud, Bulkley, Humphrey and Geoffrey. The first time she lived with her husband on his farm on Curtis Island (now part of Curtis Island National Park ).

Act

When the Praed family had to give up their business in 1876, the family moved to Great Britain . With the exception of a stay in 1894/95, Praed stayed in England for the rest of her life. There she also began to write and was able to debut successfully as an author as early as 1880 with her work An Australian Heroine . After some more or less provisional stays in Northamptonshire , among others , she finally settled in London . The couple separated after a while, but did not divorce.

Over time, celebrities from theater, literature and art met with her: Rudyard Kipling , Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde visited her as regularly as Ellen Terry and her colleagues. She soon became friends with the Irish politician and writer Justin McCarthy (1830–1912), which lasted for a lifetime, and her compatriot Mortimer Menpes (1855–1938) illustrated many of her works.

In the years 1894 to 1895 Praed visited her homeland again and returned to Great Britain via Japan, which she traveled for a few weeks. At the beginning of 1899 she got to know Nancy Harward, a medium and in the following thirty years she worked closely together to create many works in which occultism , reincarnation and rebirth were repeatedly discussed.

death

Her final years spent Praed in Torquay ( Devon ). She died shortly before her 84th birthday on April 10, 1935 and found her final resting place there. Her husband had died in 1901, and she had lost her three sons to accidents or suicide ; only her daughter Maud, who had been a patient in a psychiatric clinic for years , survived by six years.

Works (selection)

Autobiographical

• My Australian girlhood. Sketches and impressions of bush life . Unwin, London 1902.
• Our book of memories. 1884-1912 . Chatto & Windus, London 1912.

Novels

• To australian heroine . Chapman & Hall, London 1880.
• Longleat of Kooralyn or Policy and Passion. A novel of Australian Life . Bentley Books, London 1887 (EA London 1881).
• Australian Life. Black and White . Chapman & Hall, London 1885.
• The romance of a station. An Australian story . Chatto & Windus, London 1893.
• Dwellers by the river . Long, London 1902.
• A summer wreath . Long, London 1909.
• A head station . Tauchnitz, Leipzig 1886 (2 vols., English)
• Outlaw and lawmaker . Pandora, London 1988, ISBN 0-86358-223-0 (EA London 1893)
• Mrs. Tregaskiss. A novel of Anglo-Australian life . Appleton, New York 1912.
• Nùlma . Chatto & Windus, London 1897.
• Fugitive Anne. A romance of the Australian Bush . Fenno Publ., New York 1904.
• The ghost . Everett Books, London 1903.
• The maid of the river. An Australian girl's love story . Long, London 1905.
• The luck of the Leura . Long, London 1907.
• Zero. A story of Monte Carlo . Tauchnitz, Leipzig 1884 (English)
  • German: Zéro. A story from Monte Carlo . Engelhorn, Stuttgart 1884.

Plays

• The bond of wedlock . Pandora, London 1987, ISBN 0-86358-128-5 (EA London 1887)
• As a watch in the night. A drama of waking and dreaming in five acts . London 1900.

literature

Essays

• Patricia Clarke: Two colonials in London's Bohemia . In: National Library of Australia News , Vol. 13 (2003), Issue 12, pp. 14-17, ISSN  1032-1829
• J. Hooton: Rosa Praed . In: William Wilde (Ed.): The Oxford Companion of Australian Literature . 2nd Edition. OUP, Melbourne 2000, ISBN 0-19-553381-X .
• Catherine Mann: Rosa Caroline Campbell Praed . In: Patricia Clarke: Pen Portraits. Women writers and journalists in 19th century Australia . Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1988, ISBN 0-04-337007-1 , pp. 142-159.
• Dale donor: Rosa Praed. Original Australian writer . In: Debra Adelaide (ed.): A bright and fiery troop. Australian women writers of the 19th century . Penguin, Ringwood, Vic. 1988, ISBN 0-14-011238-3 .

Monographs

• Raymond Beilby: Ada Cambridge , Tasma and Rosa Praed . OUP, Melbourne 1979, ISBN 0-19-550509-3 .
• Patricia Clarke: Pink, Pink! A life of Rosa Praed, novelist and spiritualist . University Press, Sydney 1999, ISBN 0-522-84855-9 .
• Andrew McCann: Popular literature, authorship and the occult in the late Victorian Britain . CUP, Cambridge 2014, ISBN 978-1-107-06442-3 .
• Cecil Roderick: In mortal bondage. The strange life of Rosa Praed . Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1948.
• Chris Tiffin: Rosa Praed (1851-1935). A bibliography . University Press, St. Lucia, Queensland 1989, ISBN 0-86776-234-9 .