Tasma: the life of Jessie Couvreur

Component identifier:

Series 5

Content Summary:

Material collected by Patricia Clarke for a biography of Tasma (Jessie Huybers/Fraser/Couvreur) (1848-1897), novelist, short story writer, newspaper columnist, London Times foreign correspondent. Born Jessie Huybers in London, 1848, Tasma lived in Hobart from 1852 to her marriage in 1867 to Charles Fraser of Kyneton, Victoria. She spent 1873-75 in Europe with her mother Charlotte Huybers, then after returning briefly to Kyneton left her husband to return to Europe. She kept herself by contributing regular articles and short stories to the Melbourne Australasian and other periodicals and annuals and by lecturing on Australia to Geographical Societies in France and Belgium. In 1883 she returned to Melbourne to divorce Charles Fraser later marrying AugusteCouvreur, former vice-president Belgian Chamber of Representatives, and Brussels correspondent of the London Times. In 1889 her first novel Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill was published, followed by A Sydney Sovereign, In Her Earliest Youth, The Penance of Portia James, A Knight of the White Feather, Not Counting the Cost, and A Fiery Ordeal. After the death of her husband she became Brussels correspondent of the London Times.

Her sister Maria Therese, married to Portuguese painter Arthur Loureiro, was art critic for the Melbourne Age and contributed regular columns to the women's page; her sister Edith Huybers, married first to French sculptor/wood carver Jean Reverdy, then to Italo-American sculptor Pierre Valerio, was associated with the Decadent movement in Paris in the 1880s where she was art critic for the London Spectator and Universal Review later wrote for Art in America. Her brother John Huybers was an artist who exhibited at the Paris Salon and the London Marlborough Gallery and was an artist on the Pall Mall Gazette, later an artist and writer in Greece and the United States.

Much of the material was collected through descendants of Tasma's sister, Maria Therese Loureiro (Dr Renée Erdos), and her brother William Huybers (Dr Kenneth Huybers and Mrs Enid Jones) Tasma. The Life of Jessie Couvreur by Patricia Clarke was published by Allen and Unwin (Sydney) in 1994 and Tasma's Diaries edited by Patricia Clarke was published by Mulini Press (Canberra) in 1996.

Immediate source of acquisition:

The papers of Patricia Clarke were donated to the National Library under the Taxation Incentives for the Arts Scheme (now the Cultural Gifts Program (CGP)) in 1990, 1994 and 1997. Further donations were received via CGP in 2006 and 2011.

Subjects:

History
Literature

Contents

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