Mary Gaunt

Mary Gaunt
Mary Gaunt. Image from her book, Alone in West Africa, published in 1912
Born	Mary Eliza Bakewell Gaunt (1861-02-20)20 February 1861 Chiltern, Victoria
Died	19 January 1942(1942-01-19) (aged 80) Cannes, France
Language	English
Nationality	Australian
Years active	1887–1938

Mary Eliza Bakewell Gaunt (20 February 1861 – 19 January 1942) was an Australian novelist, born in Chiltern, Victoria. She also wrote collections of short stories, novellas, autobiographies, and non-fiction. She published her first novel Dave's Sweetheart in 1894. Gaunt visited many countries in her life and she wrote about her experiences in five travel books.

Early life and education

Mary was the elder daughter of William Henry Gaunt, a Victorian county court judge and Elizabeth Gaunt, née Palmer (c. 1835–1922), and was born in Chiltern, Victoria. She was educated at Grenville College, Ballarat and the University of Melbourne, being one of the first two women students to be admitted there.

Career

In 1894 she married Hubert Lindsay Miller and published her first novel. A year after her husband's death in 1900, Gaunt (now also known as Mrs Mary Miller) went to London. Gaunt left Melbourne on 15 March 1901 and never returned.

A collection of interviews with Mary were published in the 1925 Girls' Own Annual under the headings "Pioneering for Women" parts I, II, and III, and "Strange Journeys I Have Made".

From the early 1920s, Gaunt lived mostly at Bordighera, Italy. In 1940 she fled Italy and died at Cannes in 1942. She had no children.

She had a sister Lucy, and brothers Cecil, Clive, Lancelot, Guy and Ernest; Guy and Ernest were both admirals of the Royal Navy, and Guy later became a Conservative Member of Parliament. All five brothers served in The Great War.

Gaunt was posthumously inducted onto the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in 2002.

Bibliography

Novels

• Dave's Sweetheart (1894)
• Kirkham's Find (1897)
• Deadman's: An Australian Story (1898)
• Mistress Betty Carew (1903)
• The Arm of the Leopard: A West African Story (1904) [with John Ridgwell Essex]
• Fools Rush In (1906) [with John Ridgwell Essex]
• The Silent Ones (1909) [with John Ridgwell Essex]
• The Mummy Moves (1910)
• The Uncounted Cost (1910)
• Every Man's Desire (1913)
• A Wind from the Wilderness (1919)
• As the Whirlwind Passeth (1923)
• The Forbidden Town (1926)
• Saul's Daughter (1927)
• The Lawless Frontier (1929)
• Joan of the Pilchard (1930)
• Harmony: A Tale of the Old Slave Days of Jamaica (1933)
• Worlds Away (1934)

Novellas

• Bingley's Gap (1888)
• Down in the World (1893)
• The Other Man (1894)

Short story collections

• The Moving Finger (1895)
• The Ends of the Earth : Stories (1915)
• The Surrender and Other Happenings (1920)
• Life at Deadman's : Stories of Colonial Victoria (2001)

Autobiography

• Alone in West Africa (1912)
• A Woman in China (1914)
• A Broken Journey: Wanderings from the Hoang-Ho to Saghalien (1919)

Non-fiction

• Where the Twain Meet (1922) - travel
• Peeps at Great Men : George Washington and the Men Who Made the American Revolution (1929) - children's
• Reflection in Jamaica (1932) - travel

Sources

• E. Archer, 'Gaunt, Mary Eliza Bakewell (1861 - 1942)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 8, MUP, 1981, pp 632–633. Retrieved 30 October 2008
• Serle, Percival (1949). "Gaunt, Mary". Dictionary of Australian Biography. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Retrieved 30 October 2008.
• Auslit Gaunt, Mary (birth name: Gaunt, Mary Eliza Bakewell ) (a.k.a. Miller, Mary )

External links

• Works by Mary Gaunt at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Mary Gaunt at Project Gutenberg Australia
• Works by or about Mary Gaunt at the Internet Archive