'Stella' was the pseudonym of Anna Blackwell, poet and journalist. She was the eldest of nine children of Samuel Blackwell, sugar refiner, and his wife, Hannah, daughter of a Bristol jeweller. Samuel Blackwell was an anti-slavery campaigner who encouraged his daughters to develop their abilities. The family migrated to New York in 1831 after the Bristol riots and business problems. Further business difficulties led the family to Cincinatti in 1838 where Samuel Blackwell died suddenly with his children poorly provided for.
Elizabeth and Anna Blackwell set up a school with another sister to support the family. By the early 1840s Anna Blackwell was writing articles for newspapers and magazines. She later moved to Paris and supported herself with regular dispatches to newspapers in the United States and some British colonies. She was also a successful poet and in 1853 a volume of her poetry was published in England. In 1860 Blackwell was appointed foreign correspondent with the Sydney Morning Herald, a position she was to hold for over thirty years using the pseudonym 'Stella'. She covered international political developments but had a 'gossiping style' appreciated by James Fairfax that facilitated her coverage of social affairs. The highlight of her European coverage was the German occupation of Paris in 1870.
In later years Anna Blackwell became increasingly eccentric, translating books about spiritualism and reincarnation in her spare time. In the 1890s she left Paris for England where her sister, Elizabeth, America's first female physician, lived at Hastings. The Sydney Morning Herald bid goodbye to both sisters in 1910, commenting that 'Miss Anna Blackwell, who adopted the nom de plume 'Stella' was a lady of brilliant attainments, and was almost as distinguished in the world of literature as her sister was in the world of medicine.' (Clarke, 112). There is no evidence that Anna Blackwell ever visited Australia.
(Source: Adapted from Patricia Clarke Pen Portraits: Women Writers and Journalists in Nineteenth Century Australia (1988): 108-112; M. A. Elston, 'Blackwell, Elizabeth (1821-1910)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)).
