Barbara Baynton

Barbara Baynton (4 June 1857 – 11 February 1929) was an Australian author. Born to a working-class family in Scone in 1857, she eventually married a wealthy retired surgeon and became a successful writer and businesswoman. Her best known literary work, the short story collection Bush Studies, was published in 1902 and was positively received by contemporary critics. Baynton became Lady Headley as a result of her brief third marriage to Rowland Allanson-Winn, 5th Baron Headley. She died in Melbourne in 1929.

Literary scholars have interpreted Baynton as a "dissident figure" whose critical portrayals of the Australian bush contrast with its dominant depictions by the nationalist authors of her era. Baynton's fiction was written in a realist, modernist style, and depicts the harshness of bush life and the mistreatment of women and children by men in the bush. Biography Early life Barbara Baynton was born on 4 June 1857 in Scone, New South Wales. Her parents, who had immigrated to Australia from Ireland in 1840, were the carpenter John Lawrence and his wife Elizabeth . Barbara later claimed that her real father was a cavalry officer named Robert Lawrence Kilpatrick.