Rosa Campbell Praed
| Rosa Campbell Praed | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Rosa Caroline Murray-Prior 27 March 1851 Bromelton, Queensland |
| Died | 10 April 1935 (aged 84) Torquay, Devon, England |
| Occupation | Novelist, Writer |
Rosa Campbell Praed (27 March 1851–10 April 1935), often credited as Mrs. Campbell Praed (and also known as Rosa Caroline Praed), was an Australian novelist in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her large bibliography covered multiple genres, and books for children as well as adults. She has been described as the first Australian novelist to achieve a significant international reputation.
Born Rosa Murray-Prior in Bromelton in the Moreton Bay area of Queensland, Praed was the third child of Thomas Murray-Prior (1819–1892) and Matilda Harpur. Her father was born in England and went to Sydney in May 1839. He afterwards took up grazing country in Queensland and became a member of the then colony's Legislative Council. He was postmaster-general in the second Robert Herbert ministry in 1866, in the Robert Ramsay Mackenzie ministry, 1867-8, and the Arthur Hunter Palmer ministry, 1870-4, and was elected chairman of committees in the council in July 1889. After Matilda's death in 1868, he married Nora C. Barton.
According to Clarke, Praed was brought up on stations in the Burnett River district until the age of seven, at which time the family "moved following the massacre by Aborigines of the Fraser family at Hornet Bank station and the retaliatory massacre of Aborigines by whites".
Rosa had a passion for reading and writing from childhood. She was primarily self-taught: her grandmother taught her to read and her mother encouraged her love of books. Many of her early experiences were used for the political and social life of her early books. Spender writes that the trials and tribulations experienced by her mother not only made her "determine that she would never succumb to the same fate" but that they "resurfaced repeatedly in her subsequent novels".
Her mother died in 1868 and, as the eldest daughter, Praed became the mistress of her father's house and his hostess when he entertained. This gave her access "to the social and political discourse" of the colony, and provided more experiences which she used in her later books, such as Policy and Passion (1881).
On 29 October 1872 she married Arthur Campbell Praed, a nephew of the poet Winthrop Mackworth Praed. She lived with him on his property on Curtis Island, "an existence of terrifying hardship and loneliness". Spender disagrees with the critical commentary on Praed which dismisses her as a middle-class woman writer of Anglo-Australian fiction. She says that "The years which she spent on Curtis Island and which played such a crucial part in determining her values – and her voice – could hardly be described as middle-class, indulgent or privileged". She recreates her life at this time in her novel, An Australian Heroine (1880). It was also during her time on Curtis Island that she turned to spiritualism. She later wrote many novels about psychic phenomena and the supernatural.
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