Praed, Rosa (1851–1935)

Australian-born writer. Name variations: Rosa Caroline Praed; (pseudonym) Mrs. Campbell Praed. Born Rosa Murray-Prior on March 27, 1851, near Beaudesert, southern Queensland, Australia; died on April 13, 1935, in Torquay, England; daughter of Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior (a pastoralist and later postmaster-general of Queensland); educated in rural Australia and Brisbane; married Arthur Campbell Praed, in 1872 (separated late 1880s); children: one daughter and three sons.

Selected writings:

An Australian Heroine (1880); Policy and Passion (1881); Nadine (1882); The Head Station (1885); Australian Life: Black and White (1885); Miss Jacobsen's Chance (1886); Affinities: A Romance of Today (1886); The Bond of Wedlock (1887); Ariane (play, 1888); The Romance of a Station (1889); Nulma (1897); As a Watch in the Night (1900); My Australian Girlhood (1902); Dwellers by the River (1902); The Ghost (1903); Nyria (1904); The Luck of Leura (1907); Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land (1915); Soul of Nyria (1931).

Born in 1851 in the Australian Outback, near Beaudesert in Queensland, Rosa Praed was the eldest daughter of Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior, a pastoralist who later was a longtime postmaster-general of Queensland. Her early childhood was spent on stations (livestock farms) in the Burnett River district of Queensland. In 1858, after Aborigines attacked a Hornet Bank station, killing most of its occupants, her father moved the family to Brisbane.

In 1872, at the age of 21, Rosa married Arthur Campbell Praed, with whom she would have one daughter, who was born deaf, and three sons. Praed returned to the Outback with her husband, who owned a station at Port Curtis, near Gladstone. They sold their Australian properties in 1875 and sailed for England, where Praed would spend the rest of her days, but the isolation and Spartan conditions of life in the bush had made a strong impression, and would provide fodder for a number of her novels. Among these was her first book, An Australian Heroine (1880), which drew heavily on the early years of her marriage, and The Romance of a Station (1889). Writing as Mrs. Campbell Praed, she quickly made a name for herself as a novelist and playwright, and would write some 40 novels.

Among Praed's friends in London was Oscar Wilde, whom she portrayed in her novel Affinities: A Romance of Today (1886). In 1888, her play Ariane, based on her novel The Bond of Wedlock (1887), stirred controversy when it debuted in London. Both novel and play focus on some of the shortcomings of married life. Art apparently reflected life in this case, for it was not too long after the play's run that she separated from her husband.

Praed developed a marked interest in the occult and the supernatural. A strong believer in reincarnation, she reportedly was convinced that she had been a pagan priestess in classical times, and that this earlier incarnation was related in some way to the loss of all four of her children. Admittedly, they died sad deaths: her only daughter died in a mental institution, one son was killed in an automobile accident, another committed suicide, and the third was fatally gored by a rhinoceros. The first of Praed's novels to delve into the occult was As a Watch in the Night, published in 1900. The year before that she had begun living with Nancy Harward , a medium whom Praed believed was a reincarnation of a Roman slave girl, and her novel Nyria (1904), which drew on this belief, caused some stir. After Harward's death in 1927, Praed followed up with Soul of Nyria (1931). In addition to reincarnation, Praed was a strong believer in astral bodies and mental telepathy. In Mortal Bondage: The Strange Life of Rosa Praed (1948), written by Colin Roderick, explores her relationship with Harward and some of her more unconventional philosophical beliefs.

Although she returned only once, in 1894, to her native Australia, Praed managed to stay in close touch with family and friends there, and her homeland continued to serve as a backdrop for much of her writing. In addition to An Australian Heroine and The Romance of a Station, other Praed novels with an Australian theme include The Head Station (1885), Miss Jacobsen's Chance (1886), Outlaw and Lawmaker (1893), Nulma (1897), Dwellers by the River (1902), The Ghost (1903), The Luck of the Leura (1907), and Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land (1915). Praed was close friends with the politician Justin McCarthy, her collaborator on three novels. For Our Book of Memories, published in 1912, she edited McCarthy's letters and added annotations. She died on April 13, 1935, at the age of 84, in Torquay, England.

sources:

Buck, Claire, ed. The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature. NY: Prentice Hall, 1992.

Kunitz, Stanley J., and Howard Haycraft, eds. Twentieth Century Authors. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1942.

Wilde, William H., Joy Hooton, and Barry Andrews. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature. Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Don Amerman , freelance writer, Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania