AustLit

Phyllis was born at Kadina, daughter of Edgar Allen Ham whose parents came out to Australia from Cornwall on the Lady Milton in 1865, and Ethel, second daughter of William Richards, an early Methodist missioner on Eyre Peninsula who was later on the staff of the Yorke's Peninsula Advertiser. The family moved to Peterborough when she was nine.

She came to Adelaide to complete her education at the Methodist Ladies' College (Annesley) then trained at the Kindergarten Training College, graduating with a double First in 1924. She married Athol Gordon Somerville, an accountant, the son of Sesca Somerville (Sesca Lewin) in 1927. They had one son. Her brother E. L. Ham (Jack) was an actor in the repertory theatre in the 1920s-1940s.

A chance meeting with a former teacher, who asked her why she hadn't begun to write, led her to write a one-act play, "'A Family Affair", which won second prize in the 1931 competition of the Literature Society of Australia. She went on to write several more plays after this. Her novel Not Only in Stone was based on her family history and her personal knowledge of the Cornish people in South Australia as well as on extensive research. She found that the characters of Nathan and Polly in her book, based on her real life grandparents, took on an identity of their own. As she wrote later for the National Council of Women (1984), "Nathan and Polly evidently had a tale to tell, too, for they ousted my own folk entirely, took over the story, and came to life for me as if they had lived and breathed." The novel won first prize in The Advertiser's Centenary Novel Competition in 1936. She was the author of a number of short stories and scripts for ABC school broadcasts in the 1940s and 1950s.

Phyllis Somerville was widowed in 1966 and died in 1991.