Dorothy Hewett is an Australian poet, playwright, novelist, short-fiction writer, and autobiographer whose published work spans a period from the early 1940s to the early twenty-first century. Often described as a "romantic"--a term endorsed by the writer herself--Hewett, like the British Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, is frequently perceived in terms of a mythicized, larger-than-life projection of her life through her writings and responses to them. While the dramatis personae of her writings across a variety of genres often bear a relationship to herself and to people she has known, she should also be recognized for her powers of invention and the literariness of her work.

Dorothy Hewett was born in Perth, Western Australia, on 21 May 1923, the older of the two daughters of Tom and René (née Coade) Hewett. Dorothy and her sister, Lesley, who became a doctor of medicine, grew up on...