author
Marie Bjelke Petersen
1874–1969
A Danish-born Australian novelist, she became a bestselling writer of romantic fiction set largely in Tasmania and rural Australia. Her books offered readers independent heroines, dramatic landscapes, and a gentler vision of Australian life than many earlier novels.
2 Audiobooks
The captive singer
by Marie Bjelke Petersen
The immortal flame
by Marie Bjelke Petersen
About the author
Born near Copenhagen on 23 December 1874, she moved with her family to Tasmania in 1891 and built an unusually independent career for a woman of her time. Before becoming known as a novelist, she worked in physical culture, teaching exercise and health through the family’s school in Hobart.
From 1917 to 1937, she published nine romance novels that found a wide readership in Australia and overseas. Her fiction is closely linked with Tasmanian and rural Australian settings, and she is often remembered for writing popular love stories with capable women at the center.
She died in Lindisfarne, Tasmania, on 11 October 1969. Today she is remembered as an important early popular novelist whose work helped shape a more domestic, emotionally rich picture of Australian life in fiction.