Rosa Campbell Praed

Australian novelist

Rosa Campbell Praed (; 26 March 1851 – 10 April 1935), often credited as Mrs. Campbell Praed (and also known as Rosa Caroline Praed), was an Australian novelist in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her large bibliography covered multiple genres, and books for children as well as adults. She has been described as the first Australian novelist to achieve a significant international reputation.

Rosa Murray Prior was born on 26 March 1851 in Bromelton in the Moreton Bay area of the Colony of New South Wales. She was the third child of Thomas Murray Prior (1819–1892) and Matilda Harpur. Praed was brought up on stations in the Burnett River district until the age of seven, at which time the family "moved following the massacre by Aborigines of the Fraser family at Hornet Bank station and the retaliatory massacre of Aborigines by whites". They resettled in Brisbane, where Murray Prior bought a banana plantation in Ormiston. She was primarily self taught; her grandmother taught her to read and her mother encouraged her love of books. On 29 October 1872 she married Arthur Campbell Praed, a nephew of the poet Winthrop Mackworth Praed. She lived with him on his property on Curtis Island, "an existence of terrifying hardship and loneliness". Spender disagrees with the critical commentary on Praed which dismisses her as a middle class woman writer of Anglo Australian fiction. She says that "The years which she spent on Curtis Island and which played such a crucial part in determining her values – and her voice – could hardly be described as middle class, indulgent or privileged". She recreates her life at this time in her novel, An Australian Heroine (1880). It was also during her time on Curtis Island that she turned to spiritualism. She later wrote many novels about psychic phenomena and the supernatural. Rosa and her husband had two children, Maud, who was deaf, and Bulkley, in Australia, and two more sons, Humphrey and Geoffrey, after their move to England.

In 1876, after the failure of the cattle station, the Praeds moved to England where Rosa established herself as a writer. Except for a visit to Australia in 1894–95, England was henceforth her home. Her marriage was not a successful one and, within a few years of their arrival in England, Praed decided, due to her husband's extramarital affairs, to live a separate life. It was well reviewed and established her as an author. painters, artists, politicians and people interested in occultism and theosophy. She also met another expatriate Australian, the artist Mortimer Menpes. Although Praed encouraged her daughter's artistic skills, using some of her drawings to illustrate her works, Maud was admitted to a mental asylum in the late 1890s and remained there until her death in 1941. In 1894–95, she returned to Australia, visiting Japan on her return to England. As a result of this visit, she wrote Madame Izàn: A Tourist Story (1899) in which she "raised the then daring subject of an interracial marriage between a Japanese man and an Irish woman". Her three sons predeceased her, all through violent deaths – a car accident, a hunting accident, and suicide. Reviewing her life, Spender suggests that "her success is all the more remarkable given that she achieved [it] without benefit of privilege, patronage, a full purse or a formal education".