Cynthia Nolan was born at 'Logan', a property near Evandale in northern Tasmania. Her father, Henry Reed, was a pastoralist and her paternal grandfather, Henry Reed senior, was the prominent Launceston merchant who built historic Macquarie House, from which John Batman obtained his supplies before sailing across Bass Strait to found the city of Melbourne. Nolan was the fourth of sixth children, among them John Reed (q.v.). She was educated at home and later attended a Church of England boarding school, The Hermitage, in Geelong (1920-26). When her mother, Leila Borthwick (née Dennison), died in 1928, Nolan was living unhappily at 'Mt Pleasant', the home of her widowed grandmother Reed on the outskirts of Launceston. In Open Negative : an American memoir (1967), Nolan describes the place as 'the barren-hearted, isolated acres of Mt Unpleasant, Tasmania'.
Nolan left home and went to Melbourne, then later visited England and Europe. In the early 1930s, after returning for a while to Australia, she went to Hollywood and then New York. Deciding to become a nurse, she trained at St Joseph's Hospital, Chicago and at the Florence Nightingale School at St Thomas's Hospital, London. Nolan was nursing at the American Hospital in Paris at the start of the Second World War when France fell to the Germans. She escaped to the USA via Italy, then returned to Australia. Her first book, Lucky Alphonse (1944), was published in Melbourne by the newly established publishing house of Reed and Harris: its partners were her brother John, his wife Sunday Reed and Max Harris (qq.v.). They also published Angry Penguins (q.v.); the cover of its controversial 1944 issue was designed by Sidney Nolan (q.v.), who married Cynthia in 1948 (her first marriage to Jan Knut Hansen had ended). In 1950 the Nolans went to London, then settled for a time in Cambridge. The winter of 1955-56 was spent on the island of Hydra in the Aegean, where George Johnston and Charmian Clift (qq.v.) were then living.
The Nolans travelled extensively, including two years (1958-60) in the United States. At Fort Laudervale in Florida, they visited Patrick White (q.v.) with whom they became friends. Back in New York, Nolan was diagnosed with tuberculosis (TB) and she was in hospital for six months, an experience described in Open Negative. Although she continued to travel with her husband for ten more years, Nolan did not recover from TB. She died of an overdose of barbiturates in a London hotel.
