Rosa Praed was born in Queensland, in 1851. Rosa began writing in her teens, and in 1872 she married Campbell Praed, the younger son of a brewing family who had come to Australia to make his fortune.

In 1876 Campbell took Rosa with him to England, where she became a successful novelist, producing more than forty-five books over the next four decades, half of these set in Australia. In 1882 she published Nadine, achieving considerable celebrity which took her into London's artistic, political and literary circles. She separated from Campbell Praed in 1897 and began living with Nancy Harward, a psychic medium whom Rosa believed to have been a German slave-girl in Flavian Rome.

Rosa's life story is rich and dramatic. Her personal tragedies, an unhappy marriage, the loss of her children, are set against her search for a spiritual meaning to life, with investigations into reincarnation, the Theosophical movement, Catholicism, mediums, seances, astrology and Aboriginal beliefs.