Evadne Price

During her lifetime she was known for her many romance novels, some of which were serialised in national newspapers, as well as for her children's books starring the popular character Jane Turpin.

There is considerable evidence that she was born Eva Grace Price on 28 August 1888 in Merewether, New South Wales, Australia (NSW Registry of BDM cert.

Evadne's claim to have British parents is also unreliable, as BDM records show that they were both born in NSW, Australia.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography follows the Times obituarist[2] in accepting her own claim that she was born at sea in 1896[3][4] but there is no birth certificate to support this, and she can not be found in the 1901 or 1911 British census listings.

She performed in the end-of-year school concerts at these establishments, giving recitations (as reported in the Maitland Daily Mercury).

She returned to the UK in 1912 advertising herself in The Stage newspaper as Miss Eva Price (Mrs Harry A. Preston).

US Draft Registration Cards for 1917-1918 and 1942 show him living in New York where, according to the US Social Security Death Index, he died in October 1972.

From 1912 to 1916 Price secured roles in provincial tours of dramatic productions: The Girl Who Knew A Bit (1912), Mr Wu (1914), Oh I Say (1915), Within The Law (1916).

[5] In 1915 she changed "Eva" to the more evocative "Evadne" (Dumfries & Galloway Standard, 25 August 1915 p. 3) and invented a new persona for herself, claiming to have been born at sea of British parents and considerably understating her age.

In 1930, Albert E. Marriott, who had recently started a publishing company, asked Evadne Price, who was known for her skill at pastiche, to write a parodic version of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, featuring women at war; his suggested title was All Quaint on the Western Front.

Price recounts that Marriott was so delighted with her work that he immediately took the carbon copy to the News of the World, who paid him £5000.

If there was dishonesty or misrepresentation, there is no direct proof that Evadne Price was actively complicit in it; late in life, in an interview, she presented herself as a complete innocent manipulated by Marriott.

Shortly after the publication of Not So Quiet..., according to Evadne Price's later account, the publisher Albert E. Marriott committed fraud by forging a letter on Buckingham Palace notepaper claiming to have the rights to Queen Mary's memoirs.

They touch on such social issues as the care of the war-wounded; post-war decadence; eugenics; and the fate of destitute women in London.

She also acted in the movie Trouble with Junia (1967) in the minor part of Miss Hallyday, beside her husband Ken Attiwill.

In 1965, she and Ken Attiwill joined the scriptwriting team of the ATV soap opera Crossroads[10] Evadne Price had a parallel career as a broadcaster during the early years of British television.

Price was dubbed the "new astrologer extraordinaire" for twenty-five years for the SHE magazine and published a successful collection of these columns as SHE Stargazes.

When she and her husband retired to their native Australia in 1976, Evadne Price wrote the monthly horoscope column for Australian Vogue.

The Feminist Press edition included a discursive afterword by Jane Marcus, which explained much of the story of the book's origins, but the back cover describes it as 'a scathing firsthand account of war from the point of view of women actively engaged in it', which may have allowed some readers to overestimate its authenticity.

Since then there have been notable critical accounts of the novel by Angela K. Smith in The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War,[11] and by Alison Hennegan in 'Fighting the peace: Two women's accounts of the post-war years', an essay included in The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory After the Armistice, a collection edited by Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy.

Adrienne Thomas: DIE KATRIN WIRD SOLDAT und Anderes aus Lothringen, Röhrig Universitätsverlag, St. Ingbert 2008, 510 S., 37 Abb., ISBN 978-3-86110-455-1