Tasma
Tasma, the pseudonym of Jessie Couvreur, was a notable novelist and writer born in 1848 in England to a well-educated Anglo-French mother and a wine importer father. Her family relocated to Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania, where she was profoundly impacted by the sight of convicts, an experience that later influenced her literary works. Tasma's education was heavily influenced by her mother, and she began her writing career after an unhappy marriage to Charles Forbes Fraser, which ended in separation and later divorce. Her literary journey took off in Melbourne, where she became a popular writer and lecturer, with her first novel, "Uncle Piper of Piper's Hall," published in 1889. Following the death of her second husband, August Couvreur, in 1894, Tasma boldly claimed his position as a journalist, breaking gender norms of her time. Throughout her life, she received acclaim, including the prestigious l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques from France, highlighting her significant contributions to literature and journalism. Tasma's legacy endures, reflecting her determination and the challenges she faced as a woman in the late 19th century.
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Tasma
Writer
- Born: October 28, 1848
- Birthplace: Southwood Lodge, Highgate, England
- Died: October 23, 1897
- Place of death: Brussels, Belgium
Biography
Famed novelist and writer Tasma, the pseudonym of Jessie Couvreur, was the second child of Jacques Alfred Huybers, an Antwerp native living in England and employed as a wine importer, and Charlotte Sophia Ogleby Huybers, an Anglo-French woman who was, for a woman in the mid-1800’s, impressively educated. Charlotte Huybers, who held education and life experience for her children as high priorities, was running a small boarding school for girls when her daughter, Jessie Catherine, was born in 1848. Jessie, or Tasma, studied European art and literature under her mother’s tutelage throughout her youth.
In 1852, Tasma and her family, which then included three children, moved to the Australian colony of Van Diemen’s Land, later to be called Tasmania. Seeing chained groups of convicts in the streets of Tasmania was an image that stayed with young Tasma, and her opinion of the prisoners’ degradation was featured later in some of her fictional writings. Her father, Alfred Huybers, worked as a wine merchant and ran a large business in Hobart, and Tasma and her siblings studied a variety of subjects at home with their mother while they were young children. By the time her youngest sister was born, Tasma had learned so much from her mother that she was able to teach her younger siblings.
In 1867, Tasma met and married Charles Forbes Fraser, but the marriage proved an unhappy one. Although the couple did not legally divorce (a scandalous move at the time) until 1883, the marriage effectively fell apart five years after it began, when Tasma left her husband’s home and returned to live and travel with her family for the next few years. During one of the family’s trips abroad, on board a ship called the Windward, Tasma kept a diary for three-and-a-half months. The diary is Tasma’s earliest surviving writing, except for a poem published in 1869. She later set her first published story, “Barren Love,” on a ship that resembled Windward. While with her family, Tasma again helped educate the younger children, and she herself studied artistic skills at the Ecole Professionelle pour Jeunes Filles, a school that she recalled in her first newspaper article in 1877.
After roughly three years away, Tasma returned to Fraser in a doomed attempt at reconciliation, but she soon learned that while she was gone, Fraser had had an affair with a servant, who had then given birth to his child. Because Tasma, as a woman, was not legally allowed to divorce her husband for his adultery, she decided to assert her independence financially, and she focused her energies on writing. Visiting her family often in their Melbourne home, Tasma also found a literary community in Melbourne, which helped spur her writing career. Her short story “Barren Love” appeared in late 1877 and many other publications soon followed, with the author becoming highly popular as both a writer and a lecturer. Her first novel, Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hall, appeared in 1889.
Following her 1883 divorce, Tasma met August Couvreur, the Brussels correspondent for the The Times of London, and the two wed in 1885. The marriage, apparently a happy one, lasted until Couvreur’s death in 1894, at which time Tasma shocked some with her gender atypical determination to take over her husband’s journalistic position. Women were not correspondents during this time, but Tasma decided she would become one. Having already written numerous significant news articles for Australia’s Australasian over the course of two decades, she persisted until she was granted the job of Brussels correspondent. Tasma had accomplished much when she died in 1897, five days before her forty-ninth birthday. She was awarded the l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques from the president of France, an honor worth noting because it was rarely bestowed upon foreigners, much less foreign women.