Verna Susannah Coleman

Verna Susannah Coleman (née Scott; born 13 September 1925 – 4 November 2011) was an Australian biographer, whose work concentrated on neglected aspects of controversial expatriate literary and political figures.

Verna Susannah Coleman was born in Sydney, the second daughter of Jack and Ruby Scott, and educated at Our Lady of Mercy College, Parramatta and the University of Sydney. After graduating in Arts, she worked as a librarian in the Mitchell Library and in the library of the University College, Canberra.

She wrote literary reviews for various journals from 1950 to 2005, but her first biographical subject was novelist Miles Franklin, whom she had assisted as a young librarian in the Mitchell Library.Miles Franklin in America: Her Unknown (Brilliant) Career covered Franklin's political career with the feminist and union movements in Chicago.The Last Exquisite explored the life of the Australian expatriate poet and Great War novelist Frederic Manning, who left Sydney at the age of 21 to become a controversial literary figure in London.

The Wayward Suffragette was a study of activist Adela Pankhurst, daughter of suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, and is the only biography of this polarising figure, about whom it had been suggested that a biography could never be written. It follows her emigration to Australia, where she became prominent at both ends of the political spectrum, moving from the Communist Party and to the far right Australia First movement.

At the time of her death Verna Coleman was working on was a study of the careers of the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield and Katherine's Sydney-born cousin, Elizabeth von Arnim.

Verna Coleman was married to writer and politician Peter Coleman, and had two daughters, Tanya, who became a lawyer and later wife of Deputy Liberal Leader Peter Costello, Ursula, a children's writer, and a son William, who is an economist.

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