Author(s): Catherine Helen Spence

Australia | Biography

Ever Yours, C.H. Spence offers a narrative of the life of Catherine Helen Spence, in the spirit of the recent bestseller Blue Ribbons and Bitter Bread by Susanna de Vries. Novelist, journalist, preacher, public campaigner for social and electoral reform and life-long promoter of the rights of women, Spence's face graced our old $5 note. Her correspondence, and her diary - something that has never been printed before - supplement the autobiography, offering an intimate insight into the fears and pleasures - and the scintillating humour - of this remarkable public intellectual, this busy jobbing journalist, as she travels the United States, Britain, and Europe, arriving back in Australia just in time for the passage of the Women's Suffrage Act in South Australia, the first Australian colony to enfranchise women. With introductions and scholarly notes by Barbara Wall and Susan Magarey. Susan Magarey is the author of a prize-winning biography of Catherine Helen Spence: Unbridling the Tongues of Women (Hale & Iremonger, 1985).