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Eliza O'Flaherty
Eliza O'Flaherty
Born	Eliza Winstanley; 1 September 1818; Blackburn, Lancashire, England
Died	2 December 1882 (aged 64); Sydney, Australia
Occupation	stage actress and writer

Eliza O'Flaherty (née Winstanley; 1 September 1818 – 2 December 1882) was an Australian writer and stage actress.

O'Flaherty was born on 1 September 1818 in Blackburn, Lancashire, England,^[1] daughter of William Winstanley and Eliza Finch, and emigrated to Australia with her family in 1833. She debuted at the Theatre Royal, Sydney, on 31 October 1834: this was the first theatre in Australia, newly opened, and she would thereby have belonged to the very first women active as professional actors in Australia. Her father was a decorator at the theatre, and her sister Ann was engaged as singer and dancer.

She married a theatre colleague, the actor Henry Charles O'Flaherty (d. 1854), in 1841. She managed the Olympic Theatre in Sydney with her spouse in 1842, where she caused a scandal by playing Richard III; at the time, women playing men's roles was not common in Australia, where theatre in itself had only recently been introduced.

O'Flaherty left Australia for England in 1846, where she enjoyed a successful acting career, performing privately for Queen Victoria on several occasions. She also toured the United States. She has been referred to as the first Australian actor to have an international career. She joined Charles Kean's London company in 1850.

Towards the end of her acting career, O'Flaherty started a new career as a writer, and by 1864 she had given up the stage entirely. She returned to Australia around 1880 and died in Sydney.^[2]

Works

Lucy Cooper, anonymous, 1854
Shifting Scenes in Theatrical Life, 1859
Bitter-Sweet—So Is the World, as by Ariele, 1860
Margaret Falconer, 1860
Twenty Straws, London, 1864

Books as Mrs Eliza Winstanley:

The Mistress of Hawk's Crag, 1864
Voices From the Lumber Room, 1865
The Humming Bird, 1865–66
Desmond, or the Red Hand, 1866
The Cockletop, 1866
Carynthia, a Legend of Black Rock, 1866–67
What Is To Be Will Be, London, 1867
Who Did It?, 1867
The Queen of Clitherly, 1867
Astrutha, an Irish Story, 1867
Entrances and Exits, 1868
For Her Natural Life: A Tale of 1830, 1876
Imogen Hubert, 1876

Magazines edited:^[3]

Bow Bells: A Weekly Magazine of General Literature and Art, published by John Dicks
Fiction for Family Reading, published by John Dicks

References

^ "Eliza Winstanley". AustLit: Discover Australian Stories. The University of Queensland. Retrieved 10 March 2023.
^ Adelaide, Debra (1988). Australian women writers: a bibliographic guide. Pandora. ISBN 978-0-86358-148-9.
^ The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, ed. Elizabeth Webby, Cambridge University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-521-65843-8, p. 70. Viewed at Google Books, which states "reprint", perhaps alluding to the hardcover edition, ISBN 0-521-65122-0.

N. M. Robinson, O'Flaherty, Eliza (1818–1882), Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University,published first in hardcopy 1967, accessed online 18 August 2017.