Spender writes that the trials and tribulations experienced by her mother not only made her "determine that she would never succumb to the same fate" but that they "resurfaced repeatedly in her subsequent novels".

She says that "The years which she spent on Curtis Island and which played such a crucial part in determining her values – and her voice – could hardly be described as middle-class, indulgent or privileged".

Rosa and her husband had two children, Maud, who was deaf, and Bulkley, in Australia, and two more sons, Humphrey and Geoffrey, after their move to England.

Her marriage was not a successful one and, within a few years of their arrival in England, Praed decided, due to her husband's extramarital affairs, to live a separate life.

[11] 1880 she published her first book, An Australian Heroine, which had been twice returned to her for revision by Chapman and Hall's reader, George Meredith; he probably gave her advice of great value.

[12] They also mixed with playwrights, actors such as Ellen Terry,[14] painters, artists, politicians and people interested in occultism and theosophy.

They collaborated on three political novels, The Right Honourable (1886), The Rebel Rose (issued anonymously in 1888, but two later editions appeared in their joint names under the title The Rival Princess ), and The Ladies' Gallery (1888).

[1] Around this time, Menpes, at Praed's request, also decorated her house and gave art lessons to her daughter, Maud.

[15] Although Praed encouraged her daughter's artistic skills, using some of her drawings to illustrate her works, Maud was admitted to a mental asylum in the late 1890s and remained there until her death in 1941.

As a result of this visit, she wrote Madame Izàn: A Tourist Story (1899) in which she "raised the then daring subject of an interracial marriage between a Japanese man and an Irish woman".

In 1931 she published The Soul of Nyria, which purports to be an intimate account of life in Rome over 1800 years ago as set down by a modern woman in a mediumistic state.

[19] Reviewing her life, Spender suggests that "her success is all the more remarkable given that she achieved [it] without benefit of privilege, patronage, a full purse or a formal education".

[22] Spender argues that Praed "made a virtue of being Australian", and gave her English audience novels that were "racy, exotic and on the provocative fringes of polite Victorian fiction".

[23] In addition, Spender says, her writing was "extraordinary" at the time not only for her inclusion of Australian Aboriginal people as characters in her novels but for "eloquently pleading their case for justice and dignity".

[24] As well as exploring indigenous issues, Praed documents in her novels "a female perspective on the Australian bush", demonstrating her conviction that women could not achieve "a decent life".

[17] Regardless of the specific subject matter of her novels, Praed generally had some point to make "about the human condition and the organisation of society".