Does Mary Gaunt a Victorian writer?

Answer 1

Yes she was, but her writing career went on well into the 20th Century until her death during WW2.

She was an Australian, born on 20th February 1861, the daughter of a High Court judge. Educated at Grenville College in Ballarat and at Melbourne University, she became a journalist in 1894 and published her first novel, Dave's Sweetheart, the same year. She also got married then, and wrote further romantic novels or short stories in the years that followed. She was widowed in 1900 and moved to London, thereafter travelling all over the world including to China, West Africa and the West Indies.

Between 1912 and 1919 she published five travel books, and in 1929 wrote a history of the American revolution. From the early 1920s she lived mostly in Bordighera in Italy, but hated Mussolini's Fascist rule and fled to Cannes in France in 1940, when Italy joined Germany in WW2. She died there on 19th January 1942.

She had two brothers, Guy and Ernest, both of whom served as Royal Navy Admirals and Guy went on to become a British Conservative MP, although she never had any children.