Marjorie Faith Barnard OAM (16 August 1897 – 8 May 1987) was an Australian novelist and short story writer, critic, historian and librarian.

Barnard met her collaborator, Flora Eldershaw (1897–1956), at the University of Sydney, and they published their first novel, A House is Built in 1929.

She worked as a librarian at the Public Library of New South Wales and then the Sydney Technical College until 1935 when she left to write full-time, at the encouragement of her friend, writer and literary critic, Nettie Palmer, and made possible through a small allowance from her father.

She wrote to Nettie Palmer at the time that she was seeking "some sort of fulfilment, to run my vital energy into a creative mould instead of just letting it soak into the thirsty sand of a daily round".

During the next five years, she, Flora Eldershaw and Frank Dalby Davison were known as "the triumvirate"[1] for their joint work on political and cultural policy.

[4][5] As well as Flora Eldershaw and Frank Dalby Davison, Marjorie Barnard knew many of the leading writers of her time, including Vance and Nettie Palmer, Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Eleanor Dark, Xavier Herbert and Patrick White.

[2] In the late 1930s, though she still lived at home, she and Flora Eldershaw took a flat in Potts Point where they held regular gatherings which operated something like a literary salon.

Marjorie Barnard's writing career spanned four decades, from the 1920s to the 1960s, with the majority of her works being written in the 1930s–1940s, a period in Australia noted for its flowering of women writers.

Barnard's writing career was inspired by her meeting Flora Eldershaw in her first year at university, and her first work was a children's book, The Ivory Gate, published in 1920.

Using the pseudonym M. Barnard Eldershaw, they wrote five novels, as well as a wide range of non-fiction works including histories and criticisms, such as their well-regarded Essays in Australian Fiction (1938).

[10] As Maryanne Dever writes, "stories such as 'The Persimmon Tree', 'The Woman Who Did the Right Thing' and 'Beauty is Strength' take as their themes the consequences of illicit love, rivalry between women and the withdrawal and stoicism sometimes demanded of injured lovers".

[10] After Eldershaw's death, Barnard continued to write, mostly histories and literary criticism, including, in 1967, the first biography of Miles Franklin.

[11] He goes on to say that "her argument is not original, but she states it with clarity, a well-calculated density of detail, and with authority, especially when she writes on the subject she knows best, Macquarie's world".

Fiona Capp writes, for example, that through the FAW Barnard and Eldershaw actively lobbied against National Security regulations and infringements on the freedom of speech.

She edited a collection of essays defending freedom, which was not published, and a pamphlet The Case for the Future, which was banned by the censor.