AustLit

'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)