This is a rare biography of the pioneering Australian author, Mary Gaunt. Born on the Victorian Goldfields in Chiltern in 1861, Mary Gaunt was well-educated and well-connected. She was a tomboy and a rebel - her father encouraged her, her mother disapproved. One of the first female students to attend the University of Melbourne, she wrote articles and stories in order to fund her travels. She trekked through the great mahogany forests of West Africa. She went to China in the chaos that followed the downfall of the Ch'ing dynasty, and narrowly avoided the marauding White Wolf. She proved that a woman could live by her pen in that era when nice women didn't travel on their own. When war came, she was trapped behind enemy lines and never made it home to Australia. She died in occupied France in 1942. Her experiences were recorded in five pleasantly written travel books: Alone in West Africa (1912), A Woman in China (1914), A Broken Journey (1919), Where the Twain Meet (1922), Reflection - in Jamaica (1932). In 1929 she also published George Washington and the Men Who Made the American Revolution. Between 1895 and 1934, 16 novels or collections of short stories were published, mostly with love and adventure interests. Three other novels were written in collaboration with John Ridgwell Essex. A collection of interviews with Mary were published in the 1925 Girls' Own Annual under the headings "Pioneering for Women" parts I, II, and III, and "Strange Journeys I Have Made".
Includes a list of Mary Gaunt's publications.