Dame Flora Louise Shaw, Lady Lugard DBE (born 19 December 1852 – 25 January 1929), was a British journalist and writer.

[2] She was born at 2 Dundas Terrace, Woolwich, South London, the fourth of fourteen children, the daughter of an English father, Captain (later Major General) George Shaw, Royal Artillery, and a French mother, Marie Adrienne Josephine (née Desfontaines; 1826–1871), daughter of French governor of Mauritius.

Her paternal grandfather was Sir Frederick Shaw, third baronet (1799–1876), of Bushy Park, Dublin, and a member of parliament from 1830 to 1848, regarded as the leader of the Irish Conservatives.

In her books, young girls are encouraged to be resourceful and brave but in a traditional framework, acting in support of "gentlemanly" fathers and prospective husbands, rather than on their own behalf.

Charlotte Mary Yonge recommended it along with works of "some of the most respected and loved authors available in late Victorian England" as "wild... attractive and exciting".

[9][10] At The Times, she was sent as a special correspondent to Southern Africa in 1892; Australia in 1901; and New Zealand in 1892, partly to study the question of Kanaka labour in the sugar plantations of Queensland.

[10] The lengthy articles in a leading daily newspaper reveal a late-Victorian metropolitan imagery of colonial space and time.

Shaw was required to testify before the House of Commons Select Committee on British South Africa during the controversy on the Jameson Raid into the Transvaal on 29 December 1895.

[15] In an essay that first appeared in The Times on 8 January 1897, by "Miss Shaw", she suggested the name "Nigeria" for the British Protectorate on the Niger River.

[2] In her essay, Shaw made the case for a shorter term that would be used for the "agglomeration of pagan and Mahomedan States" to replace the official title, "Royal Niger Company Territories".

Shaw was close to the three men who most epitomised the British Empire in Africa: Cecil Rhodes, George Taubman Goldie and Sir Frederick Lugard.