Author: Twamley, Louisa Anne
Biography:
TWAMLEY, Louisa Anne, later MEREDITH (1812-95: Orlando)
Her parents, Louisa Anne (or Ann) Meredith (1768-1839) and Thomas Twamley (1757-1834), who belonged to different social classes, waited twenty years to marry and Louisa Anne, born in Birmingham, Warwickshire, on 20 Jul. 1812, was their only child. She was educated by her mother and a governess, and as a teenager had private tuition in art from Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830). She exhibited with the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists between 1829 and 1838 and for a time earned her living as a painter of portrait miniatures. Her 1835 volume of Poems that included engravings by her own hand was published in London to considerable acclaim: GM praised her “talent and accomplishments” and Fraser’s Magazine likened her to L. E. L. (Landon, q.v.). It was followed by several similar works combining original poetry or prose with coloured plates: The Romance of Nature (1836), Flora’s Gems (1837), Our Wild Flowers (1839). On 18 Apr. 1839 she married her cousin Charles Meredith (1811-80) at Edgbaston Old Church. He was born in Wales but the family had emigrated to Australia in 1821 and he had been a sheep farmer there. The newlyweds settled in Tasmania, had four sons of whom two survived them, and struggled to make a living. Charles became a police magistrate and MP but died of heart disease at Launceston in 1880. Louisa Anne continued to draw and to write: seven volumes of verse, some prose fiction, books for children, and—best known and most successful—three memoirs of life in the new colony, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales (1844), My Home in Tasmania (1850), and Over the Straits (1861). She was an honorary member of the Tasmanian Royal Society and was granted a pension of £100 in 1884 for “distinguished literary and artistic services.” Her final publication was a third series of her popular illustrated Bush Friends in Tasmania (1891). She died on 21 Oct. 1895 at Collingwood, Melbourne, Victoria, and was buried in the Melbourne General Cemetery. (Orlando 12 Sept. 2024; ODNB 12 Sept. 2024; ADB 12 Sept. 2024; findmypast.com 12 Sept. 2024; Birmingham Journal 27 Apr. 1839)