AustLit

Frances Fitzgerald Elmes, the daughter of a medical practitioner, spent her childhood in Berwick, Vic. She worked as a journalist in Melbourne in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An early feminist, she was the author of the performed, but unpublished, play 'The New Woman' [189-?] and of The Melbourne Cookery Book [190-?]. She went to London in 1905 and worked as a journalist on Charles Chomley's (q.v.) British Australasian. Her relationship with Chomley was depicted in a fictional guise by Chomley's nephew Martin Boyd (q.v.) in his Langton novels.

Frances Fitzgerald Elmes died in London in 1919, a victim of the influenza epidemic.