Constance McAdam was born near Glasgow in Scotland and moved with her family to Dunedin, New Zealand at the age of seven. She was educated at the Girls' High School, Dunedin and began writing poetry for the Witness (Otago). Her first paid literary effort was a short story published in the Dunedin Star.
McAdam moved to Sydney in September 1898 and continued her career in literature and journalism. She contributed to Australian and English newspapers.
In 1903, she moved to London to pursue a literary career there, where she published her only novel, A Pagan's Love. An active suffragette, she was imprisoned in Holloway as part of a group of women who caused a disturbance in the House of Commons. Returning to New Zealand in 1925, she was ejected from New Zealand Parliament in 1931 for protesting against the Child Welfare Act: according to an article in Smiht's Weekly, 'she contends [the Welfare Act] gives the official too much power over family life. Her great desire is to have proper Montessori teachers is New Zealand for such backwards children as do come into the hands of the state'. According to the same article, while in New Zealand, she was 'on the staff of a backward school, sub-matron of a women's gaol, and attendant of a mental asylum of 1500 inmates'.
She subsequently moved to Brisbane, where in 1935, she was imprisoned in Boggo Road Gaol for refusing to pay a fine levied on her for telling a fortune with tea leaves. On the 1949 Queensland Electoral Roll, she is listed as living in South Brisbane. She died in Brisbane in 1951.
Her life and her writings about prison have been the subject of research by Brisbane historian Christopher Dawson.
Note: as Constance Clyde, McAdam was also the author of the religious pamphlet Will They Never Come? [1915].
Sources:
Clyde, Constance. 'Through London with the Suffrage Procession'. Gympie Times, 30 March 1907, p.3. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/188306095
Dawson, Christopher. 'A Suffragette Recalls Boggo Road Gaol'. Inside Boggo Road, 27 June 2018. https://www.boggoroadgaol.com.au/2018/06/clyde2.html
'Feminist Journalist', Smith's Weekly, 14 April 1928, p.13.
Stephens, A. G. (ed.) Australian Autobiographies, vol.2.
