Nathan Hobby’s The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard takes on the challenging task of sorting out the complicated details of Prichard’s life as a child, sibling, governess, teacher, friend, lover, wife, mother, aunt, grandmother, traveller, celebrity, journalist, poet, novelist, short-story writer, social activist, public speaker and communist.
Prichard spent critical years as a wife and widow writing fiction in her Western Australian home, but the image of her as an isolated writer captures only a small fraction of an otherwise crowded and committed public life.
