a full purse or a formal education". Praed Place in the Canberra suburb of Garran is named in her honour. Literary style and themes Praed never lost her interest in her native country and though most of her life was passed in England, a large proportion of her novels were based on her Australian experiences. Others dealt with the occult, with spiritualism, or with abnormal states of mind. She was much interested in psychological problems, her character-drawing is good although her women are better than her men, she had some sense of humour, and she could tell a story. Rosa Praed has been claimed as "the first Australian-born novelist to achieve a significant international reputation". 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". 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". In My Australian Girlhood, for example, she writes "There has been no-one to write the Blacks' epic: not many have said words in their defence; and this is but a poor little plea I lay down for my old friends". 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". As she wrote in The Luck of the Leura, "The woman always pays ... In spite of her husband's protestations, and to his genuine distress, she had to do all those things which he had declared should never be required of her". Spender argues that the similarities between the Brenda of this book and Praed's mother are "impossible to ignore". However, she says that Praed does not endlessly copy her mother, creating instead "realistic characters" through which she generalised about the experience of women in the bush. Many of her heroines, too, confronted the question of whether to marry. In The Bond of Wedlock (1887) she explores violent marriage, and in Nadine: The Study of a Woman (1882) she looks at what a woman can do when she has a child and no husband. Regardless of the specific subject matter of her novels, Praed generally had some point to make "about the