Elizabeth A. Murray was the daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Charles and Sara Poitier. Her father was then with the British Army in Jamaica. At the age of eighteen, after her parents had died, Elizabeth moved to Ireland where she met and married Captain Virginius Murray, so named because his grandfather, John Murray, was the last British Governor of Virginia in America. In 1852 Virginius was appointed Commissioner on Victoria's goldfields, first at Beechworth and later in the Dunolly area. Elizabeth followed in 1855 with their five sons. She stayed in Melbourne but she did not like the life and returned to England in 1859. Her husband died in the colony on Christmas Day 1861 at the age of forty-four.
Elizabeth settled in Harrow and having previously written novels with some success (not traced), she wrote Ella Norman, or, A Woman's Perils (1864). Based on her experience, it seems Murray intended that the novel impress upon the British government, and the Benevolent Societies it encouraged, the folly of sending young women to a harsh country which had no real place for them. Although it became a forgotten work until it was republished in 1985, the novel must have met initially with moderate success, for Elizabeth's sons were educated at Harrow. (She had received only 325 pounds from the Victorian government as compensation for the death of her husband when she expected two thousand.) Elizabeth was also known as a capable artist and wrote Sixteen Years of an Artist's Life in Morocco, Spain, and the Canary Islands (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1859).
There are more than 100 descendants of Virginius and Elizabeth in Australia, including a great-grandchild in Tasmania known to be the Earl of Dunmore. One of her great-grandsons, Sir Brian Murray, who wrote the Foreword to the 1985 edition of Ella Norman, served as Governor of Victoria.
