Catherine Gaskin

Gaskin was born in Dundalk Bay, County Louth, Ireland in 1929. When she was only three months old, her parents moved to Australia, settling in Coogee, a suburb of Sydney, where she grew up. Her first novel This Other Eden, was written when she was 15 and published two years later.[1] After her second novel, With Every Year, was published, she moved to London. Three best-sellers followed: Dust in Sunlight (1950), All Else is Folly (1951), and Daughter of the House (1952).

She completed her best-known work, Sara Dane, on her 25th birthday in 1954, and it was published in 1955. It sold more than 2 million copies, was translated into a number of other languages, and was made into a television mini-series in Australia in 1982.[2] This novel is loosely based on the life of the Australian convict businesswoman Mary Reibey, whose image has appeared on the Australian $20 note since 1994. Other novels included A Falcon for a Queen (1972) and The Summer of the Spanish Woman (1977).[3]

Gaskin moved to Manhattan for ten years, after marrying a United States citizen. She then moved to the Virgin Islands, then in 1967 to Ireland, where she became an Irish citizen.[3] She also lived on the Isle of Man.[1] Her last novel was The Charmed Circle (1988). She then returned to Sydney, where she died in September 2009, aged 80, from ovarian cancer.

References

Sources

• Obituary, The Age, 24 September 2009, p. 25

• Gaskin at the Fantastic Fiction website