Annie Osborn was the daughter of Isaac Delbridge of Melbourne, the wife of the Reverend Andrew Rule Osborn (1875-1949), a Presbyterian minister, and mother of eight children including Andrew Delbridge Osborn (1902-1997), the distinguished librarian. As a journalist in Australia she edited the woman's pages of the Age and the Leader : a weekly journal of news, politics, literature, and art in Melbourne, as well as the children's page of the latter using the pseudonym of 'Cinderella'. Osborn also wrote regularly for the Presbyterian journal, The Messenger, and for the Australian Christian World. Her column in The Messenger was written under the pseudonym of 'The Minister's Wife' and greatly advanced religious journalism in Australia.
Osborn wrote children's readers that became so popular they were adopted in Australian schools and adapted for radio broadcasts. She also wrote two mysteries; a political pamphlet, Women and the State (1919?) and Almost Human : reminiscences from the Melbourne Zoo (1917?). Her son compiled A Checklist of Children's Books Written by Annie Osborn (1978). Osborn left Australia in 1927 as her husband pursued clerical opportunities in North America. They lived in the United States, 1927-1932 and 1937-1948, with four intervening years in Canada. While in the United States, Annie Osborn was President of the Mount Vernon Federation of Christian Women.
(Source: 'Mrs. A. R. Osborn, Author, Dies At 73', New York Times (28 March 1948): 48).
