Joan à Beckett Weigall, Lady Lindsay (16 November 1896 – 23 December 1984)[2] was an Australian novelist, playwright, essayist, and visual artist.

Trained in her youth as a painter, she published her first literary work in 1936 at age forty under a pseudonym, a satirical novel titled Through Darkest Pondelayo.

In 1967, Lindsay published her most celebrated work, Picnic at Hanging Rock, a historical Gothic novel detailing the vanishing of three schoolgirls and their teacher at the site of a monolith during one summer.

[5] She was also the author of several unpublished plays, and contributed essays, short stories, and poetry to numerous journals and publications throughout her career.

[12] After returning from travel in England and Europe, Lindsay published her first novel, Through Darkest Pondelayo: An account of the adventures of two English ladies on a cannibal island, in 1936, under the pseudonym Serena Livingstone-Stanley.

[12] Published by Chatto & Windus in the United Kingdom, the novel is structured as a parody of popular travel books of the time but filled with intentional grammatical errors, also functioning as a satire on English tourists abroad.

In 1928, she interviewed actress Margaret Bannerman for Victoria's The Weekly Courier, and, in 1941, co-authored the History of the Australian Red Cross with husband Daryl.

This was followed with Facts Soft and Hard, a humorous, semi-autobiographical account of the Lindsays' travels in the United States while Daryl was on a Fulbright Award,[7] which took the couple to New York City on a study tour of American art collections held by the Carnegie Corporation.

Lindsay wrote the novel over a four-week period[16] at her home Mulberry Hill in Baxter, on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, and constructed it around the real-life Hanging Rock, a monolith that had fascinated her since her childhood.

[17] She compared the story to the work of Henry James, citing the "book about the children in a haunted house with a governess" (The Turn of the Screw).

[17] The final chapter was published only in 1987 as a standalone book titled The Secret of Hanging Rock, and also included critical commentary and interpretive theories on the novel.

[9] It was made into a 1975 feature film by producers Patricia Lovell, Hal and Jim McElroy, and director Peter Weir, which was hailed as initiating the revival of Australian cinema.

[13] Amor supplied illustrations for the book, which tells the story of Syd, an anthropomorphic sixpence coin's adventures on the ocean floor.

As the Lindsays had no children, their Mulberry Hill home in Langwarrin South, Victoria was donated at her wishes to the National Trust upon her death.

[23] The Mulberry Hill estate is open to the public for self-guided tours, and contains both Joan and Daryl Lindsay's original artwork and personal possessions.