Mary Gaunt

This is a rare biography of the pioneering Australian author, Mary Gaunt. Born on the Victorian Goldfields in Chiltern in 1861, Mary was well-educated and well-connected. She was a tomboy and a rebel - her father encouraged her, her mother disapproved. One of the first female students to attend the University of Melbourne, she wrote articles and stories in order to fund her travels. She trekked through the great mahogany forests of West Africa. She went to China in the chaos that followed the downfall of the Ch'ing dynasty, and narrowly avoided the marauding White Wolf. She proved that a woman could live by her pen in that era. When war came, she was trapped behind enemy lines and never made it home to Australia.

GUY GAUNT’s infiltration of America’s leadership changed the course of history. When the Great War began he was the British naval attaché in Washington, beached for recklessness at sea. Taking over a network of disaffected immigrants he thwarted all efforts by the powerful German-American establishment in the United States to stop America from supporting the Allies. The exposure of a sinister German underground showed President Woodrow Wilson that America could not remain neutral. The Foreign Office never forgave him for outclassing its fledgling Secret Service. Toughened by early life in the turbulent Australian goldfields, Guy built a career by playing outside the rules. He dodged his way up the ranks of the Royal Navy, married for money, snatched up a country estate, won a seat in Parliament and faked his disappearance to run off with the wife of the King’s doctor. He was active again in World War II—new life, new wife—but the Whitehall mandarins took a cruel revenge.

Mary Eliza Bakewell Gaunt (1861-1942), was an Australian novelist. she was educated at Grenville College, Ballarat, where her facility in writing was noted. Mary Gaunt believed that a woman had the right to follow her own career and be financially independent, even if married. On 19 March 1881 she was one of the first women to sign the matriculation roll of the University of Melbourne; she began an arts course but did not continue after poor results in her first year. She turned to writing: 'It was my ambition to be a writer', she recalled, 'I wrote merely because I wanted to make money', and money was 'a means of locomotion'. Drawing on childhood memories of goldfield towns and her brothers' yarns of exotic places, she contributed articles and stories to Australian and overseas papers and magazines. One of her earliest pieces was an article on gold for Cassell's Picturesque Australasia. Her earnings enabled her to travel to England and India...

Mary Eliza Bakewell Gaunt (1861-1942), was an Australian novelist. she was educated at Grenville College, Ballarat, where her facility in writing was noted. Mary Gaunt believed that a woman had the right to follow her own career and be financially independent, even if married. On 19 March 1881 she was one of the first women to sign the matriculation roll of the University of Melbourne; she began an arts course but did not continue after poor results in her first year. She turned to writing: 'It was my ambition to be a writer', she recalled, 'I wrote merely because I wanted to make money', and money was 'a means of locomotion'. Drawing on childhood memories of goldfield towns and her brothers' yarns of exotic places, she contributed articles and stories to Australian and overseas papers and magazines. One of her earliest pieces was an article on gold for Cassell's Picturesque Australasia. Her earnings enabled her to travel to England and India...

Mary Eliza Bakewell Gaunt was an Australian novelist. Gaunt had difficulties at first but eventually established herself, and was able to travel in the West Indies, in West Africa, and in China and other parts of the East. Her experiences were recorded in five pleasantly written travel books: Alone in West Africa (1912), A Woman in China (1914), A Broken Journey (1919), Where the Twain Meet (1922), Reflection - in Jamaica (1932). In 1929 she also published George Washington and the Men Who Made the American Revolution. Between 1895 and 1934, 16 novels or collections of short stories were published, mostly with love and adventure interests. Three other novels were written in collaboration with John Ridgwell Essex. A collection of interviews with Mary were published in the 1925 Girls' Own Annual under the headings "Pioneering for Women" parts I, II, and III, and "Strange Journeys I Have Made".

Small and strong, with determined and imperious manners at times required, she was a powerful character, usually in conflict with authority when she wished to travel through dangerous countries. Inevitably, her point of view won out. Perhaps this is what prompted Mary Gaunt to write about these adventurous tales. "Down in the World" is one of them.