The story of a daring and ardent Australian woman of letters Barely known in her lifetime, Lesbia Harford is now celebrated for innovative writing on female desire, revolutionary change and the minutiae of daily life – work that hints at ways of loving, living and writing yet to be fully explored. Born with a heart condition that ensured she’d die young, Harford chose a life of passion and commitment to her principles, becoming one of Australia’s first women lawyers and then abandoning law for factory work. As a pioneering trade-union leader, she campaigned for women’s rights and joined the banned Industrial Workers of the World, risking a jail term that would have killed her. She fell in love with women and men as she moved through revolutionary Sydney and bohemian Melbourne, mixing with figures such as Katharine Susannah Prichard, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Guido Baracchi, Bob Menzies, John Curtin and John Cain Snr. Through her novel and poems, she melded radical politics with a modernist sensibility, decades ahead of her time. Against the backdrop of the Great War and the events that created modern Australia, this first full-length biography of Harford shows why one of our best writers still matters a century on, and what her life reveals about art, politics and hope in a time of global upheaval.