Actress, novelist and editor, Eliza Winstanley was a fascinating woman of the 19th century. She came to Australia with her family and made her debut at Barnett Levey's Theatre Royal in Sydney in 1834. In 1841 she married Henry Charles O'Flaherty and they returned to England in 1846. Acting parts became less and, in one of the few ways open to women in the 19th century to earn money, she began to write and edit. She was very successful. Some of her novels and short stories were set or partially set in Australia, and described, from her own experiences and memories, colonial and theatrical life in the Sydney of the 1830s and early 1840s. Eliza Winstanley returned to Australia about 1880 a few years before her death in 1882.
Lists of her works can be found in the biography Eliza! Eliza! by Nance Irvine (Mulini Press, 1997), in Debra Adelaide's Bibliography of Australian Women's Literature (D. W. Thorpe, 1991), Index to Serials in Australian Periodicals and Newspapers. Nineteenth Century by Toni Johnson-Woods (Mulini Press, 2001), and in the appendices of Women at Work on Page and Stage: The Work of Eliza Winstanley (University of Queensland, 2008).
Works that are known to have Australian content are indexed by AustLit.
