'Novelist, journalist and activist Katharine Susannah Prichard won fame for vivid novels that broke new ground depicting distinctly Australian ways of life and work — from Gippsland pioneers and West Australian prospectors to Pilbara station hands and outback opal miners. Her prize-winning debut The Pioneers made her a celebrity but she turned away from jaunty romances to write a trio of inter-war classics, Working Bullocks, Coonardoo and Haxby’s Circus. Heralded in her time as the ‘hope of the Australian novel’, her good friend Miles Franklin called Prichard ‘Australia’s most distinguished tragedian’.
'This biography of a literary giant traces Prichard’s journey from the genteel poverty of her Melbourne childhood to her impulsive marriage to Victoria Cross winner Hugo Throssell, and finally on to her long widowhood as a 'red witch', marked out from society by her loyalty to the Soviet Union and her unconventional ways.
'Through meticulous archival research and historical detective work, Nathan Hobby reveals many unknown aspects of Prichard’s life, including the likely identity of the mysterious lover who influenced her deeply in her twenties, her withdrawal from politics during her remarkable five-year literary peak and an intimate friendship with poet Hugh McCrae. Lively and detailed, The Red Witch is a gripping narrative alert to the drama and tragedy of Prichard’s remarkable life.'' (Publication summary)
(Introduction)
'Australian literary biographies are often published with the hope of rekindling interest in forgotten figures. This was the case, one suspects, with both Frances De Groen’s 1998 biography of Xavier Herbert and more recently with Suzanne Falkiner’s Mick: A Life of Randolph Stowe, published in 2016. Anyone who has heard of Katharine Susannah Prichard (and sadly the numbers are dwindling) knows she was a fine author of both prose and plays, who flourished as a writer from the early 1920s to the 1960s. Scholars and readers of Prichard know she was also a committed communist. She gave speeches embracing Bolshevism on the Perth Esplanade in 1919 and attended early Communist Party of Australia meetings in Sydney. The controversies and the contradictions of Prichard’s life are, perhaps, less intriguing than her intimate moments, as Nathan Hobby shows.' (Introduction)
'Half a century after Katharine Susannah Prichard’s death, it is more than timely that the first biography of the woman once hailed as a leading Australian writer is published. Her fame was at its peak in the 1930s; later, her novels were regularly set on school syllabuses. Today, however, her work is largely forgotten. To some, she is remembered for the hardline communism she maintained until her death, earning the notoriety in Western Australia that is reflected in this book’s title.' (Introduction)
(Introduction)
'Nathan Hobby’s The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard takes on the challenging task of sorting out the complicated details of Prichard’s life as a child, sibling, governess, teacher, friend, lover, wife, mother, aunt, grandmother, traveller, celebrity, journalist, poet, novelist, short-story writer, social activist, public speaker and communist.' (Introduction)
'Katharine Susannah Prichard published her first short story in 1899 and her final novel in 1967. At last we have a definitive biography, a book tracing her life and the formation of the Australian literary culture she helped to create.' (Introduction)
'Katharine Susannah Prichard is one of those mid-century Australian literary figures like Vance Palmer whose name is mentioned in literary histories more often than her books are read. As it happens, she was a schoolfriend of Vance’s future wife, Nettie, née Higgins, who became a distinguished literary critic, as well as of the pioneering woman lawyer Christian Jollie Smith, and Hilda Bull, later married to the playwright Louis Esson. All were politically on the left as adults, and Prichard and Jollie Smith joined the Communist Party. It was the distant Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 that converted Katharine to the communist cause; she was a communist in Western Australia before there was a party there for her to belong to.' (Introduction)
'Nathan Hobby has written an engaging and eloquent biography of a significant figure of Australian literature and politics about whom we have, until now, no more than a cursory knowledge.'(Introduction)
