This essay reads the novel of expatriate colonial writer Rosa Praed, Outlaw and Lawmaker (1893), as an intervention in the public debate about the Irish question and the marriage question which were vigorously discussed in the late 1880s in Britain, the United States and Australia. Although the novel belongs to the genre of colonial romance, Ferres argues that its author 'speaks from a range of different positions within these debates, and thus underlines the inherent difficulty of characterising women's interests' (32).