Ethel Turner, Mrs. H. R. Curlewis, is another of the few Australian authors living in Australia who have had large publics in England. As a reviewer, I hailed with delight her first books, Seven Little Australians and The Family at Mis-Rule, and prophesied the wide and continuous success which she has attained with her stories of child life in Australia. Mrs. Curlewis was born in Yorkshire, but she has lived in Sydney ever since I can remember.
Frances Campbell (Mrs. Howard Douglas Campbell), the author of Love the Atonement, The Two Queenslanders, and other novels, married a cousin of the late Duke of Argyll, who was out in Queensland, and commenced writing at his Grace’s suggestion. In point of fact, she came to us with a letter of introduction from him. Since then she has been an active and successful journalist, doing several special journeys abroad as correspondent for the great London dailies. She is not to be confused with Mrs. Vere Douglas Campbell, the mother of Marjorie Bowen, who is also a novelist. I made the mistake myself once.
Mrs. Mannington Caffyn, who under the pseudonym of “Iota” wrote the famous A Yellow Aster, was a beautiful and spirited Irish girl, the daughter of a country gentleman, who took to hospital nursing as a profession, and married a doctor, whose ill-health drove him to Australia. Her life there was full of hard experiences, but she did not make a mark in literature till her return to England. Andrew Lang was struck with the extraordinary ability of A Yellow Aster, and urged with all his influence one of the old classical publishing houses to bring it out, but in vain. Hutchinson saw his opportunity, accepted the book, advertised it with genius, and made a colossal success of it. Other successes followed, so real that she was able to send her growing boys to a crack public school. Another novelist not born in Australia, but resident there for some years, was “Rita,” who was educated in Sydney.
The Countess von Arnim, author of a delightful series of books from Elizabeth and Her German Garden to Fraulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther, was an Australian born, the daughter of Mr. Herron Beauchamp.
Haddon Chambers, one of my earliest literary friends in London, though I have seen little of him for many years, I met because we came from Australia at about the same time. He was born near Sydney, of Irish parents, and was for a while in the New South Wales Civil Service, like his father before him. Feeling, as I did, that Australia was no place for a literary career, he visited England when he was twenty, and returned to England for good when he was twenty-two, a handsome, alert, indomitable Australian boy. He looked very boyish in those days. Beginning life in England as a journalist and story-writer, he suddenly took London by storm with his play, Captain Swift. Captain Swift was one of the greatest parts which Beerbohm-Tree has created, and from that time forward Chambers became one of the dramatists who count.
To my mind, the best author living in Australia at the present moment is the Rev. William Henry Fitchett, President of the General Conference of the Methodist Church of Australia, editor of a magazine and a weekly newspaper, and Principal of a ladies’ college in Melbourne. He made his name with a series of remarkable books about the exploits of the British army—writing at first under the pseudonym of “Vedette.” Few men have ever written so brilliantly or so sympathetically on the subject as the author of Fights for the Flag and Deeds that Won the Empire.
A. B. Paterson, the poet who wrote “The Man from Snowy River,” is an Australian by birth and residence. He is another of the few Australian authors who have a vogue in England without ever having lived there. He is recognised not only as one of the chief poets of Australia, but as a publicist. He is a solicitor by profession.
W. H. Ogilvy, the best living Australian poet, was not born in Australia, nor does he live there now, but he spent many years in the Australian bush, and caught its spirit better than any poet except Adam Lindsay Gordon.
The Countess of Darnley, who wrote some fiction a few years ago, was the beauty of Melbourne when I was there in the ’eighties. Lord Darnley met her when he came out to Australia with one of the English cricket elevens. He was then the Hon. Ivo Bligh, a name which will never be forgotten in the history of sport.
The charming and elegant Eleanor Mordaunt, author of Lu of the Ranges, the best novel ever written about hardships in Australia, is English by birth.