Memoir

Rosie: Scenes from a vanished life by Rose Tremain

by Brenda Niall •

August 2018, no. 403

Chatto & Windus, $32.99 hb, 210 pp, 9781784742270

Memoir

Rosie: Scenes from a vanished life by Rose Tremain

by Brenda Niall •

August 2018, no. 403

‘Write about what you don’t know,’ British novelist Rose Tremain advised young authors. That has been her own strategy during a long and star-studded career. It is quite a stretch from the court of England’s Charles II in Restoration (1989), or that of Christian IV of Denmark in Music and Silence (1999), or that of the muddy goldfields of The Colour (2003) set in nineteenth-century New Zealand, or The Road Home (2008), which movingly reveals an East European migrant’s struggles in today’s London. Impressive research and an imagination that flourishes on challenge have made Tremain one of the finest and least predictable of novelists.

Brenda Niall

Brenda Niall’s writing career began during her time as an academic at Monash University, where she was Reader in the Department of English. Since 1995 she has been writing full time. Her books include award-winning biographies Martin Boyd: A Life (1988), Georgiana (1995), The Boyds (2002), Judy Cassab (2005), and a memoir, Life Class (2007). Her book The Riddle of Father Hackett was shortlisted for the 2010 Magarey Medal for Biography. She is a frequent reviewer for The Age and ABR, and has been a guest at the Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Byron Bay literary festivals. In 2004 she was awarded an AO for services to Australian Literature. Her most recent books are My Accidental Career (2022), Can You Hear the Sea? My grandmother's story (2018) and Friends and Rivals: Ethel Turner, Barbara Baynton, Henry Handel Richardson and Nettie Palmer (2020).