Jean Bedford (born 4 February 1946) is an English-born Australian writer who is best known for her crime fiction, but who has also written novels and short stories, as well as nonfiction.
[3] After the failure of her first marriage, she returned to Australia and worked at the Canberra College of Advanced Education.
[10] Bedford says she was inspired to write it after reading the American novel Desperadoes which she felt dealt with national myth in a way that Australian writers didn't.
[11] Bedford includes Patrick White and D. H. Lawrence as her early literary influences, and also admires Frank Moorhouse.
[13] Her collection of short stories, Country Girl, Again "paints a bleak, unillusioned picture of rural life and its stifling or destructive effects on the lives of women".
[14] Similarly, Colouring In, a collaborative work, also explores women's lives, this time looking at "the pleasures and pressures of urban life".
Sister Kate, her novel imagining the life of Ned Kelly' sister, provides a feminist perspective on a legend which until then had been almost totally expressed in terms of male mythology, and If With a Beating Heart is about "the turbulent life"[14] of Claire Claremont, who was stepsister to Mary Shelley and lover to Lord Byron.