Florence Broadhurst: Her Secret & Extraordinary Lives
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: N/A
Pages: Good
Few lives in the annals of Australian creative history burn as brightly — or as mysteriously — as that of Florence Broadhurst, the wallpaper empress whose dazzling patterns adorned the walls of the world's most glamorous interiors, even as her true origins remained shrouded in deliberate myth. Helen O'Neill's Florence Broadhurst: Her Secret & Extraordinary Lives chronicles the astonishing reinventions of a woman who rewrote her own biography as boldly as she designed her iconic prints — a Queensland farm girl who became a Shanghai cabaret performer, a London socialite, and ultimately one of Australia's most celebrated decorative artists, before meeting a violent and unsolved end in 1977. O'Neill brings the tenacity of an investigative journalist and the eye of a cultural critic to this richly layered portrait, unearthing decades of carefully constructed deception to present a subject who was, in many ways, her own greatest work of art. The book situates Broadhurst's life against the sweeping backdrop of 20th-century bohemia — from pre-war Asia to post-war Sydney — illuminating how a fiercely ambitious woman carved out creative dominance in a world designed to ignore her. For anyone who has ever wondered what lies beneath the surface of a beautiful pattern, this biography offers a thrilling and deeply human answer.
Author: Helen O'Neill
Format: Hardback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: N/A
Pages: Good
Few lives in the annals of Australian creative history burn as brightly — or as mysteriously — as that of Florence Broadhurst, the wallpaper empress whose dazzling patterns adorned the walls of the world's most glamorous interiors, even as her true origins remained shrouded in deliberate myth. Helen O'Neill's Florence Broadhurst: Her Secret & Extraordinary Lives chronicles the astonishing reinventions of a woman who rewrote her own biography as boldly as she designed her iconic prints — a Queensland farm girl who became a Shanghai cabaret performer, a London socialite, and ultimately one of Australia's most celebrated decorative artists, before meeting a violent and unsolved end in 1977. O'Neill brings the tenacity of an investigative journalist and the eye of a cultural critic to this richly layered portrait, unearthing decades of carefully constructed deception to present a subject who was, in many ways, her own greatest work of art. The book situates Broadhurst's life against the sweeping backdrop of 20th-century bohemia — from pre-war Asia to post-war Sydney — illuminating how a fiercely ambitious woman carved out creative dominance in a world designed to ignore her. For anyone who has ever wondered what lies beneath the surface of a beautiful pattern, this biography offers a thrilling and deeply human answer.