When Ethel Turner published her first novel, Seven Little Australians, in 1894, she articulated what Australian readers took to be a childhood peculiarly Australian and definitively modern. The novel was instantly successful, selling five thousand copies in Australia in the year following its publication and causing the powerful A. G. Stephens, the literary editor of the Bulletin, to name Turner as one of a group of Australian writers whose works exemplified the literary nationalism of the 1890s. Seven Little Australians was the first of a trio of influential works published in three successive years of this formative decade, followed by "Banjo" Paterson's The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses (1895) and Henry Lawson's While the Billy Boils (1896).

Ethel Sibyl Turner was born on 24 January 1872 in Doncaster, Yorkshire, the younger of two daughters of Sarah Jane and George Burwell. In 1874 George Burwell died suddenly, and Sarah Jane married again, to...