In her lifetime in the second half of the nineteenth century, Tasma was a famous woman. Her first novel, Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill, was the book of the season when it was published in London for Christmas 1888. After publication of her second novel, In Her Earliest Youth (1890), the Times (London) said she was "surpassed by few British novelists." She was compared to George Eliot and described as the Australian Jane Austen, and her characterization was said to equal that of Charles Dickens. A century later these comments seem hyperbolic, even sad. If her writing was so remarkable, why was she forgotten so quickly? She has been given little space in Australian literary histories and was bracketed in a recent publication with little-known or forgotten writers.

The usual explanation for her obscurity is that like other Australian women novelists of the nineteenth century who wrote about love, sex...