Author and adventurer Beatrice Grimshaw was one of the New Women of the 1890s. Born in 1870, she left home at the age of twenty-one to work as a journalist. Living at a time when the maps still had “tantalizing blanks” in them, she was one of those individuals who felt the lure of far-away places. In 1904 she took off on her own for the South Seas and never returned, spending the next thirty years living in New Guinea and travelling around the islands.
She was also a prolific writer. Her non-fiction travel books are now the subject of considerable academic study and in her day she was one of the best known writers of popular fiction, churning out dozens of novels of romance and adventure set in theSouth Seas.
Her heroines were usually energetic and independent women like the author and the other ‘revolting daughters’ of the first wave of feminism.