Lilian Turner

Lilian Turner (1867-1956) was born Lilian Wattnall Burwell at Lincoln, England, and brought to Sydney as a child; she and her younger sister Ethel, later famous for Seven Little Australians, both took the surname of their stepfather Henry Turner. The two produced a school magazine together at Sydney Girls' High School, and Lilian's first novel, The Lights of Sydney (1896), took first prize in a London publisher's competition. She married a dentist who struggled to hold work, and wrote to keep the household going, publishing about twenty-five novels, most of them stories about Australian girls. By the time she died at Turramurra in 1956, every one of them was out of print.