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'Novelist, journalist and activist Katharine Susannah Prichard won fame for vivid novels that broke new ground depicting distinctly Australian ways of life and work — from Gippsland pioneers and West Australian prospectors to Pilbara station hands and outback opal miners. Her prize-winning debut The Pioneers made her a celebrity but she turned away from jaunty romances to write a trio of inter-war classics, Working Bullocks, Coonardoo and Haxby’s Circus. Heralded in her time as the ‘hope of the Australian novel’, her good friend Miles Franklin called Prichard ‘Australia’s most distinguished tragedian’.
'This biography of a literary giant traces Prichard’s journey from the genteel poverty of her Melbourne childhood to her impulsive marriage to Victoria Cross winner Hugo Throssell, and finally on to her long widowhood as a 'red witch', marked out from society by her loyalty to the Soviet Union and her unconventional ways.
'Through meticulous archival research and historical detective work, Nathan Hobby reveals many unknown aspects of Prichard’s life, including the likely identity of the mysterious lover who influenced her deeply in her twenties, her withdrawal from politics during her remarkable five-year literary peak and an intimate friendship with poet Hugh McCrae. Lively and detailed, The Red Witch is a gripping narrative alert to the drama and tragedy of Prichard’s remarkable life.'' (Publication summary)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Christina Spittel Review of Nathan Hobby, The Red Witch : A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard
2024
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Journal of Biography and History , no. 8 2024;
— Review of The Red Witch : A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard 2022 single work biography '‘So there’s a new book about me coming out next year’, tweeted Katharine Susannah
Prichard on 27 April 2020. ‘I wouldn’t believe everything it says.’ A photo shows
her biographer, Nathan Hobby, signing a contract with Melbourne University Press
(MUP) in an Officeworks carpark. He looks content, if a little daunted. Only slightly
delayed by the pandemic, the book, a richly illustrated, handsome volume with
generous endnotes and an extensive bibliography, produced in MUP’s Miegunyah
imprint, appeared last year. Published fifty years after her death, it is the first full
biography of Prichard.'(Introduction)
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Nathan Hobby on Fiction, Communism and Katharine Susannah Prichard
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: History Australia , vol. 20 no. 2 2023; (p. 316-317)
— Review of The Red Witch : A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard 2022 single work biography'Australian literary biographies are often published with the hope of rekindling interest in forgotten figures. This was the case, one suspects, with both Frances De Groen’s 1998 biography of Xavier Herbert and more recently with Suzanne Falkiner’s Mick: A Life of Randolph Stowe, published in 2016. Anyone who has heard of Katharine Susannah Prichard (and sadly the numbers are dwindling) knows she was a fine author of both prose and plays, who flourished as a writer from the early 1920s to the 1960s. Scholars and readers of Prichard know she was also a committed communist. She gave speeches embracing Bolshevism on the Perth Esplanade in 1919 and attended early Communist Party of Australia meetings in Sydney. The controversies and the contradictions of Prichard’s life are, perhaps, less intriguing than her intimate moments, as Nathan Hobby shows.' (Introduction)
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[Review] The Red Witch : A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , vol. 47 no. 1 2023; (p. 222-223)
— Review of The Red Witch : A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard 2022 single work biography'Half a century after Katharine Susannah Prichard’s death, it is more than timely that the first biography of the woman once hailed as a leading Australian writer is published. Her fame was at its peak in the 1930s; later, her novels were regularly set on school syllabuses. Today, however, her work is largely forgotten. To some, she is remembered for the hardline communism she maintained until her death, earning the notoriety in Western Australia that is reflected in this book’s title.' (Introduction)
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Nathan Hobby, The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: JASAL , December vol. 22 no. 2 2022;
— Review of The Red Witch : A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard 2022 single work biography 'Early in the Constance Garnett translation of Anna Karenina a few lines appear that suggest something more historically significant than Anna’s emotional turmoil. Anna is travelling back from Moscow to her husband and son in St Petersburg, just after a ball where her romance with Vronsky begins. She has been in Moscow to help repair her brother’s marriage; now her own is at risk. “Moments of doubt were continually coming upon her, when she was uncertain whether the train were going forwards or backwards, or were standing still altogether . . . ‘What’s that on the arm of the chair, a fur cloak or some beast? And what am I myself? Myself or some other woman?’” A cloak is protective. It can be fashionable. A beast is a dangerous monstrosity; terrifying and unknowable. The same object flickers between these poles, and the viewer, herself in a state of extreme personal uncertainty, must stabilise her vision, for the object cannot be both things. At the same time there is some confusion about the actual progress of the train. Is it going forward? Is it going backwards? Is it going nowhere? This dire uncertainty also applies to Soviet Russia, which at one time seemed socially protective, progressive, indeed fashionable to many outsiders, before Stalin’s monstrosity came into full view. Some of these outsiders, Katherine Susannah Prichard included, never really emerged from under Stalin’s cloak.'(Introduction)
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[Review] The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Historical Studies , vol. 53 no. 4 2022; (p. 658-659)
— Review of The Red Witch : A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard 2022 single work biography'Katharine Susannah Prichard is an iconic, larger-than-life figure in Australian literary culture who has been poorly served by biography, until now. When she was dubbed ‘the red witch’ by a journalist it was a term of disparagement, but it is deployed affectionately by Nathan Hobby. This book derives from Hobby’s 2019 PhD on the early life of Prichard at the University of Western Australia. His training in librarianship is evident in his confident handling of the material, which daunted earlier would-be biographers. The KSP collection at the National Library runs to 3.9 metres or approximately twenty-four boxes.' (Introduction)
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‘The Red Witch’ : How Communist Writer, Intellectual and Activist Katharine Susannah Prichard Helped Shape Australia
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 9 June 2022;
— Review of The Red Witch : A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard 2022 single work biography'Nathan Hobby’s The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard takes on the challenging task of sorting out the complicated details of Prichard’s life as a child, sibling, governess, teacher, friend, lover, wife, mother, aunt, grandmother, traveller, celebrity, journalist, poet, novelist, short-story writer, social activist, public speaker and communist.' (Introduction)
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Nathan Hobby The Red Witch : A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 25 June - 1 July 2022;
— Review of The Red Witch : A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard 2022 single work biography'Katharine Susannah Prichard published her first short story in 1899 and her final novel in 1967. At last we have a definitive biography, a book tracing her life and the formation of the Australian literary culture she helped to create.' (Introduction)
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An Adventurous Nature : A Writer’s Life through Her Own Eyes
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , July no. 444 2022; (p. 13-14)
— Review of The Red Witch : A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard 2022 single work biography'Katharine Susannah Prichard is one of those mid-century Australian literary figures like Vance Palmer whose name is mentioned in literary histories more often than her books are read. As it happens, she was a schoolfriend of Vance’s future wife, Nettie, née Higgins, who became a distinguished literary critic, as well as of the pioneering woman lawyer Christian Jollie Smith, and Hilda Bull, later married to the playwright Louis Esson. All were politically on the left as adults, and Prichard and Jollie Smith joined the Communist Party. It was the distant Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 that converted Katharine to the communist cause; she was a communist in Western Australia before there was a party there for her to belong to.' (Introduction)
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A Life of Endurance and Principle: Dylan Hyde Reviews ‘The Red Witch : A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard’ by Nathan Hobby
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Rochford Street Review , vol. 34 no. 1 2022;
— Review of The Red Witch : A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard 2022 single work biography'Nathan Hobby has written an engaging and eloquent biography of a significant figure of Australian literature and politics about whom we have, until now, no more than a cursory knowledge.'(Introduction)
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Nathan Hobby : The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: The Newtown Review of Books , August 2022;
— Review of The Red Witch : A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard 2022 single work biography 'Nathan Hobby explores the life of one of Australia’s most controversial writers.'
