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drove a Cobb & Co coach through the Australian outback.
The French-American doctor Cornelius Herz, whom she
described as “one of the leading lights of society”, showed
her around the opium dens of San Francisco. She met
Sitting Bull, who shook her hand with a “grip of steel” so
painful she thought her “bones would certainly crack”.
However, the popularity of her tours eventually waned
as Gilbert and Sullivan’s more conservative and increas-
ingly successful oeuvre made the racy foreign opéra bouffe
seem passé. Soldene, too, found that she was outdated; now
in her middle years, she became a figure of fun, with her
attempts to be sexually provocative labelled as “the very
incarnation of vice” and “unutterably sad and ghastly”.
By 1892, she was alone and broke in Australia, in need
of a new job. Luckily, she was introduced to newspaper
journalism, later recalling that “I seized the chance, also the
pen.” Witty and insightful, Soldene connected with readers
as she had with audiences. Within three years she was back
in England, writing a column for the Sydney Evening News.For the next 11 years, Soldene posted a weekly article to
Australia about whatever she liked: her personal life,
theatre, parties, gossip and big events such as the diamond
jubilee or the “deadly dull” 1908 Olympics. Often writing
about politics, she became much preoccupied with the
career of Winston Churchill, whom she disliked intensely,
declaring: “Isn’t it a pity Winston Churchill has got a
swelled head?” She had no time for the suffragettes, either,
suggesting that “the women pull the strings anyway”.
Reporting on technological innovations, Soldene was
unconvinced about the motor car – except to spare horses
waiting outside theatres in the rain. She was a nostalgic
Victorian writing in the Edwardian era: she missed the
dark nights without electrification, and rued the passing of
traditional ways. The world of 1838, when she was born,
must have felt a lifetime away from the 1900s.
There was, though, one change that Soldene did want to
see. In 1896 she published her novel Yo u ng Mr s S t a p l e s, a
tale of a marriage gone wrong. Extremely controversial atILLUSTRATION BY RACHEL DICKENS