Verna Coleman was a biographer of Australian lives, the wife of writer and politician Peter Coleman (q.v.) and the mother-in-law of former Australian treasurer Peter Costello. She won a scholarship to Our Lady of Mercy College, Parramatta and at 16, she went on to Sydney University. After graduating, Coleman worked as a Librarian in the Mitchell Library. In 1949, she met Peter Coleman and the couple decided they would leave Australia, travelling to London, where they married in 1952. During this time Coleman worked as a librarian in Essex while her husband completed a masters degree at the London School of Economics. They spent a year in the Sudan before returning to Australia in 1955, living in Canberra where she worked in the library of Canberra University College.
By her own admission, Coleman 'came to writing books rather late' adding that she was 'motivated by the comparatively early death of my friend the Australian poet James Mcauley...' Attracted by the research and investigative demands of biography, her first subject was Miles Franklin, whom she had assisted at the Mitchell Library.
Her final work, cut short by illness, was a study of the emergence of modernism in fiction as illustrated by the writing careers of Katherine Mansfield and her Sydney-born cousin Elizabeth von Arnim. This was true to one of her recurring themes - as she put it, 'the problems of isolation experienced by Australian writers...and the attraction of expatriation'. Source: Sydney Morning Herald, (15 November 2011): 18
