AustLit
The daughter of Thomas Murray-Prior and granddaughter of Thomas Harpur (q.v), Rosa Praed was raised on her father's stations. She also experienced the political and social life of Brisbane when her father entered politics. After her marriage to Arthur Campbell Praed in 1872, the couple lived at the Praed station near Gladstone for three years before moving to England in 1876. Rosa Praed revisited Australia only once, in 1894-1895, but frequently drew on her life in Australia for much of her fiction.
Praed was encouraged to write by her mother from an early age and she contributed to the family's handwritten 'Marroon Magazine'. Her first novel, An Australian Heroine, was published in 1880. More than forty-five books followed, including collaborations with the Irish politician Justin McCarthy. Her short story and sketch collections include Australian Life (1895), Dwellers by the River (1902), The Luck of the Leura (1907), Stubble Before the Wind (1908), and A Summer Wreath (1909).
After separating from her husband, Praed lived between 1899-1927 with Nancy Harward whom she believed to be the reincarnation of a Roman slave girl. Praed's growing interest in spiritualism and the occult is reflected in many of her later novels.
Praed's most admired novel is Policy and Passion (1881) which, like many of her Australian novels, explores the unsatisfactory marriages of intelligent women to insensitive and spiritually limited males. The well-drawn background of the years following Queensland's separation from New South Wales demonstrates the astute observations of politics that were included in much of Praed's fiction. Colin Roderick also notes that her work shows a notable justice to the Aborigines.
Praed moved with Nancy Harward to Torquay in the early 1920s, but, following the latter's death in 1927, she lived the remainder of her life in loneliness and ill-health. Rosa Praed died in 1935.
Praed also wrote, with Justin McCarthy, The Grey River, a book on the Thames published in 1890.
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , May vol. 10 no. 1 1981 1981 (p. 48-56) y
— Appears in: Margin , April no. 35 1995 1995 (p. 33) y
— Appears in: Novel Politics : Studies in Australian Political Fiction Carlton : Melbourne University Press , 2020 2020 y
— Appears in: Victorian Literature and Culture , March vol. 35 no. 1 2007 2007 (p. 175-187) y
— Appears in: Margin , July-August no. 48 1999 1999 (p. 23-30) y
— Appears in: Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland , February vol. 17 no. 9 2001 2001 (p. 406-426) y
— Appears in: A Bright and Fiery Troop : Australian Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century Ringwood : Penguin , 1988 1988 (p. 199-216) y
— Appears in: Queensland Review , October vol. 7 no. 2 2000 2000 (p. 25-36) y
— Appears in: The Queenslander , 18 April 1935 1935 (p. 20) y
— Appears in: Australian Cultural History , no. 23 2004 2004 (p. 7-23) y
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , October 2016 2016 y
— Appears in: Australian Journal of Irish Studies , vol. 1 no. 2001 2001 (p. 118-125) y
— Appears in: Ozwords , no. 8 1995 1995 (p. 2-4) y
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 67 no. 1-2 2007 2007 (p. 121-134) y
— Appears in: Queensland Review , May vol. 9 no. 1 2002 2002 (p. 67-87) y
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October-November vol. 27 no. 3/4 2012 2012 (p. 107-123) y
— Appears in: Margin , July-August no. 42 1997 1997 (p. 2-12) y
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , May vol. 22 no. 1 2005 2005 (p. 37-50) y
— Appears in: Margin , July/August no. 78 2009 2009 (p. 5-15) y
— Appears in: The Time to Write : Australian Women Writers 1890-1930 Ringwood : Penguin , 1993 1993 (p. 238-255) y
— Appears in: Australian Literature, 1788-1914 Detroit : Gale Research Co. , 2001 2001 (p. 301-312) y
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October vol. 17 no. 4 1996 1996 (p. 344-352) y
— Appears in: Australasian Drama Studies , October no. 23 1993 1993 (p. 56-64) y
— Appears in: Queensland Review , June vol. 21 no. 1 2014 2014 (p. 23-38) y
— Appears in: Imago : New Writing , vol. 12 no. 2 2000 2000 (p. 100-102) y
— Appears in: Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace : 1840s-1940s Sydney : Sydney University Press , 2018 2018 (p. 51-82) y
— Appears in: JASAL , no. 8 2008 2008 (p. 31-44) y
— Appears in: The Literature of Melancholia : Early Modern to Postmodern. Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan , 2011 2011 (p. 160-172) y
— Appears in: Hecate , vol. 42 no. 1 2016 2016 (p. 69-83) y
— Appears in: Westerly , Spring vol. 44 no. 3 1999 1999 (p. 76-88) y
— Appears in: With Fond Regards : Private Lives through Letters Canberra : National Library of Australia , 1995 1995 (p. 84-87) y
— Appears in: Who Is She? St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1983 1983 (p. 26-36)
— Appears in: National Library of Australia News , September vol. 13 no. 12 2003 2003 (p. 14-17) y
— Appears in: Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand London : Routledge , 2014 2014 (p. 125-134) y
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , May vol. 27 no. 1 2012 2012 (p. 33-46) y
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 70 no. 2 2010 2010 (p. 110-123) y
— Appears in: Aurealis , no. 122 2019 2019 y
— Appears in: Australia and Galicia : Defeating the Tyranny of Distance Jannali : Antipodas Monographs , 2008 2008 (p. 309-319) y
— Appears in: Editing in Australia Campbell : Australian Defence Force Academy. Dept. of English ; University of New South Wales Press , 1990 1990 (p. 125-136) y
— Appears in: Australasian Victorian Studies Journal , vol. 11 no. 2005 2005 (p. 41-53) y
— Appears in: Journal of Xihua University , 30 August vol. 29 no. 4 2010 2010 (p. 89-91) y
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 15 no. 1 2015 2015 y
— Appears in: Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism , no. 319 2016 2016 (p. 304-400)
— Appears in: Translation of Cultures Amsterdam : Rodopi , 2009 2009 (p. 113-130) y