Ethel Turner

Born in Yorkshire and taken to Australia as a child, Ethel Turner became one of the country’s most popular writers for young readers. Reliable biographical sources describe her as an author and children’s writer whose work reached a wide audience in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Her most famous book, Seven Little Australians (1894), remained the work she was most closely associated with, and it helped secure her lasting place in Australian literary history. Sources also note that she wrote many other novels, stories, and pieces for periodicals over a long career.

There is some variation in reference sources about her birth year, with major sources listing either 1870 or 1872. The dates given here follow the user’s 1870–1958 form, which is also used by the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the National Portrait Gallery of Australia.