Evadne price biography of christopher

posted on 26 Aug 2021

Evadne Price and the Jane series

One of the most pleasurable things about obsessively hunting for second hand books in some unpromising and uncongenial junk shops is that you occasionally turn up something that takes you by surprise.

This was the case when I found a dusty but basically sound copy of a book called Jane the Unlucky with a fantastically colourful and alluring dust jacket (pictured) written by Evadne Price. I couldn’t quite place the author’s name but it rang a distant bell – somewhere deep in my past I’d heard that name before – and I’d never heard of ‘Jane’ despite the fact that this copy suggested it was one of a popular series.

Clearly this was worthy of some further research.

So who was Evadne Price? Quite a character it seems although her biography is not always straightforward because she clearly spent plenty of time reinventing her life story.

Born in 1888, she spent her early years in Australia before moving