'One of the earliest women protagonists in Australian cultural history' (Paddle, p.152), Hannah Villiers Boyd was the author of two books in the mid-19th century - Letters on Education; Addressed to a Friend in the Bush of Australia (1848) and A Voice from Australia (1851). Born into a middle-class Irish family she was educated at home, although she claimed that her parents were able to provide a musical training through a travelling musician at one stage. She also indicates that they were able to send her to study for a year in Paris and Berlin. In her first publication Boyd claims, however, that her educational process was largely one of 'self-culture.'
After the breakdown of her marriage in 1836 (aged 29), Boyd became a governess, while also supporting two children on her own. She emigrated to Australia in 1841 a part of the Irish diaspora that left Ireland as a result of economic depression and the Great Famine. It was during this period that she wrote her two books. In the first publication, which comprises seven letters inscribed to Mrs Hannibal MacArthur, Boyd's instruction for the educational training of young ladies who live in remote areas of Australia had been based on the eleven years she had by then spent as a governess (ctd. "Domestic Intelligence," p.3).
Although she returned to Ireland in 1854, settling in Dublin, Boyd is thought to have come back to Australia for an unknown period of time later that decade.
