Belle Moseley was the daughter of South Australian MLA, James Grey Moseley (1848 –1937) and his first wife, Jessie Craig (c.1849 - 1906). James's father, Henry J. Moseley, had been an early settler in South Australia. James Moseley and his brother spent their early years building up a variety of stations, including Coondambo, Yadlamalka, Yardea, Paney, Pondona, Yartoo, and Carcuppa. In his early 60s, he turned to parliament, and represented the district of Flinders for 22 years, retiring at age 84.
James Moseley was married twice. James and Jessie had six children: James George (1871-1948), Jessie Beatrice (1874-1955), Marion Craig (1876-194?), Isabelle ('Belle') Mary (1878-1952), Ria Louise Elizabeth (1881-1965), and Amy Stuart (1886-1898). The youngest daughter, Amy, was killed in an accident when the pony drawing the carriage in which she was riding stumbled, throwing her from the carriage, and then rolled over her ('A Sad Accident'). Moseley's second marriage, to Amy Elsie Derrington (1866-1943), took place in 1913, and produced no children.
Belle Moseley began publishing as a teenager: her first traced work, 'Little Jack', was awarded first prize in a competition run by the Association of the Sunbeam Society and was published in morning and evening papers in Adelaide in 1895, when she was seventeen. Moseley remained involved with the Sunbeam Society throughout the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, and her letters and essays appear regularly in the columns of the Chronicle's 'Soldiers of the Pen' club for teenage readers.
Her first mature works, published under the name 'Isabelle Moseley', began to appear in 1902: during the early 20th century, her short stories and serials appeared in a number of Australian newspapers, including the Adelaide newspapers and the Sydney Mail. She also wrote pieces that were closer in tone to literary journalism than to fiction: short imaginative works on 'Country Visitors to the Show' or 'Election Night'.
In 1911, she left Australia to travel around England and the Continent, sending back a series of travel articles to the Port Augusta Dispatch: she wrote a dozen articles under the title 'An Augustan Abroad' between May and September 1911, from Sri Lanka [as Ceylon], Egypt, France, Gibraltar, England, Scotland, and Norway, ending with her return to Port Augusta in September.
Her first novel appeared in 1914, and was followed by at least two others in the early 1920s. But either her output slowed in this period, or her works have not been traced. No works by Belle Moseley have yet been identified between her 1923 serial The Cameron Clan and her death nearly thirty years later.
Moseley died in October 1952 in Seacliff, a suburb of Adelaide. According to legal notices, she had never married.
