Grimshaw, Beatrice, 1871-1953.
The missing blondes / by Beatrice Grimshaw. (Sydney : Invincible Press, [1945])
Born in Ireland and educated in France, the University of London, and Queen’s College in Belfast, Beatrice Grimshaw became a journalist in Dublin from the age of 21. She worked for a number of shipping companies in the Canary Islands, the United States of America and England. Her first novel,
Broken Away (1897), was a romance about an assertive, independent woman. In 1902, she became publicity manager in the Liverpool head office of the Cunard Line. In 1903 she left for the Pacific region to report for the
Daily Graphic, accepting commissions to write tourist publicity material for Pacific islands and New Zealand. In 1907, she left for Papua New Guinea in 1907 (accepting commissions from the London
Times and the Sydney Morning Herald) and stayed there for most of the next twenty-seven years. She wrote forty-two books, most written and some set in Papua, including a partly autobiographical title,
Isles of Adventure (1930). When the Red Gods Call (1911) is the best known: the book has been frequently reprinted, serialised and translated into several languages. Between 1917 and 1922, Beatrice managed a plantation near Samarai and accompanied exploring parties up the Sepik and Fly rivers in 1923 and 1926. In 1933 she tried tobacco growing near Port Moresby with her brother Ramsay. After visiting Fiji, Samoa and Tonga again, she retired in 1936 to Kelso, near Bathurst, spending the last seventeen years of her life in Australia. Nigel Krauth;’s
J.F. Was Here is partly based on her unconventional life. Although she was a best-selling author in the 1920s and sometimes favourably compared with Joseph Conrad, Bret Harte and Robert Louis Stevenson, she is now little known.
