Ellen Joy Todd was the daughter of Captain Andrew Orr, Royal Artillery, and his wife Lucy Erskine, née Acworth. After her father's death in 1870, she lived with her mother and her siblings with her grandfather, an Anglican clergyman, at Wimborne and Stoke. The sisters were educated at home and learned Italian. Ellen married Robert Henry Todd, a surgeon, on 14 June 1887 and they sailed for New South Wales shortly after.
Ellen Todd was a founder of the Ladies' Club in 1889 with Lady Carrington, the Governor's wife, its patron. In the same year she and her husband moved to Maclean in northern New South Wales but returned to Sydney in 1892. They circulated in the upper echelons of Sydney society. Todd worked as a journalist for several Sydney papers, including the Dawn, the Echo, the Evening News, and the Illustrated Sydney News. She joined the staff of the Australian Town and Country Journal and wrote book, theatre and music reviews. Its editor, Walter Jeffery (q.v.), appointed Todd the first editor of the weekly Woman's Budget, published by S. Bennett Ltd. It reached a circulation of 150,000 under her editorship, claiming to be 'Written by Women for Women'. The magazine focused on cookery, dressmaking and fashion but also addressed wider interests and provided a vehicle for women writers.
Todd worked in an honorary capacity for the Empire Gazette, edited by Adela Pankhurst Walsh (q.v.) from 1933 to 1940. This was a publication of the Australian branch of the London-based Women's Guild of Empire, a middle-class welfare organisation, and through it Pankhurst preached anti-communism, family and the need for a strong British Empire. Todd was a member of the Women's Literary Society and a founding member of the Society of Women Writers.
The Todds were childless and Ellen Todd spent her last years alone after the death of her husband in 1931. Margaret Bettison (239) describes her as 'A small-boned, bustling woman with patrician manners and old-fashioned black clothes ...'
See also the full Australian Dictionary of Biography Online entry for Ellen Joy Todd.
(Source: Margaret Bettison, 'Todd, Ellen Joy (1860 - 1948)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 12, MUP, 1990: (238-239); Mrs. R. H. Todd Looking Back: Some Early Recollections of Mrs. R. H. Todd (1938)).
