The career of one of Australia’s most talented novelists, Barbara Hanrahan (1939–91), was cut short by illness, and her work has now largely slipped from view. I edited several of her novels in the late 1970s for the University of Queensland Press. Whereas other UQP authors of the time, such as the gregarious Olga Masters, enjoyed media attention, with the introspective Barbara Hanrahan it was a struggle to build the readership her talent deserved.

This illuminating biography is therefore doubly welcome, for Barbara was not only a brilliantly original novelist but also a highly accomplished visual artist. Annette Stewart’s first book about Hanrahan, Woman and Herself, a work of literary criticism, was published by UQP in 1998, alongside The Diaries of Barbara Hanrahan, edited by Elaine Lindsay. Now, drawing on Hanrahan’s often confronting diaries and more than a dozen autobiographical novels, Stewart movingly charts the artist’s dual career. Her remarkable creative life was without compromise on either front, as this fine biography reveals.