Writer and editor Jean Bedford died after a long illness on 11 December 2025. She leaves a considerable literary legacy.

Author of eight novels, including Sister Kate and a trio of Anna Southwood detective novels, two collections of short stories (one written with Rosemary Creswell), Jean was also co-founder of the Newtown Review of Books and co-editor from 2012 to 2019. Many of her reviews, which reflect the range of her reading, from Georgette Heyer’s crime novels to Emily Bronte and Jean Rhys, have continued to attract readers since they were first published.

A passionate advocate for the importance of books and writing across genres, Jean made a significant contribution to Australian literature both as writer and editor – she was Literary Editor of the National Times, edited several anthologies, and worked as a publisher’s editor with numerous authors – and as a teacher of creative writing, inspiring countless students.

As a friend she was both kind and sharp-eyed, and enormous fun. As a colleague she was unfailingly generous in her support.

Our thoughts are with her daughters Sofya, Miriam and Ruth and their families.

Below are tributes from those who knew Jean. If you would like to share your memories of Jean and her work, please do so in the comments.

Linda Funnell:

I first met Jean in 1984 in the office of her literary agent Rosemary Creswell, where I had just started work. Already a fan of Sister Kate – it felt like the historical novel I’d been waiting for, a novel that put a woman at the centre of an Australian legend – I was more than a bit starstruck, a condition that has only deepened over the years. It wasn’t just that Jean was a talented writer (as if that wasn’t enough) but her intellect, her generosity, her wit, and her steadfast belief in the central importance of literature – from Wuthering Heights to crime fiction – was an inspiration for me and many others.

Jean and Rose were close friends, and Jean had an office down the corridor from Rose’s at 195 Glebe Point Road. When in 1986 the agency moved to an old sail-making workshop in East Balmain, Jean came too and had her desk by the door. I had a front-row seat to the creation of Colouring In, the collection of stories Jean and Rose wrote together, and what is perhaps most surprising amid all the carousing that book describes is just how much work each produced during this period.

I only edited one of Jean’s books, the thriller Now You See Me (1997), when I was Fiction Publisher at Random House. We drifted in and out of touch over the years as she and Peter Corris moved north, to Coochiemudlo Island in Queensland, then to Byron Bay, and south again to her beloved Illawarra coast, then back to Sydney’s inner west: Newtown, Earlwood and Marrickville. You needed a lot of space in your address book to keep track of Jean.

Thinking back on her life I am struck by what a great collaborator she was — writing Colouring In with Rose, collaborating on the journal Heather Wearne talks about below, the advice and encouragement she gave to so many of us, editors and publishers as well as writers, and of course her collaboration here, on the Newtown Review of Books.

When we started NRB, Jean liked to say that she was just in it for the free books. However, the care she took editing and encouraging contributors – including me – not to mention the quality she brought to her own reviews, spoke otherwise. In the early days we would often meet in the pubs and cafes of Newtown, reviewer lists and draft schedules in hand.

By the end of 2019 Jean’s health was deteriorating and she stepped back from NRB, though I kept her name on our email signature and our friendship continued – increasingly, in her final years, by text message as in-person visits became more difficult for her.

The Newtown Review of Books will celebrate its fourteenth birthday next March, and for as long as it continues I hope it will honour her ethos of generosity, inclusion and the importance of literature.

Sophie Cunningham:

I came to know Jean Bedford’s work when I was a junior editor at McPhee Gribble, the publishing house which had recently published Colouring In: A book of ideologically unsound love stories (1986), which Jean had co-authored with Rosemary Creswell. I loved those stories so much I read all Jean’s earlier work. Two particular pieces of work have stayed with me. The first is, perhaps, obvious: the extraordinary and ground-breaking novel Sister Kate (1982), written from the point of view of Ned Kelly’s sister. If you haven’t read it, you must! The second piece of writing is slighter, but for me even more powerful. The short story ‘Twins’ is included in Country Girl Again (1979, collection of short stories; reprinted with additional stories 1985), and its ending haunts me to this day. It’s no exaggeration to say that about once a week I return to the final image as if it was a real-life event that I’d witnessed, or even been caught up in. Not many writers can do that to a reader, but Jean could.

I came to know Jean socially, both when I worked at McPhee Gribble and then when I lived in Sydney and worked at Allen & Unwin. In more recent years, after I returned to Melbourne, she was very kind about my meagre visual arts talents and commissioned me to do a painting for our mutual friend Helen Barnes. Jean was a terrific woman. She was attentive, supportive and kind. I’ll miss her.

Jill Eddington:

Jean was an invaluable member of the Board of the Byron Writers Festival for several years while I was Director. She contributed enormously to our festival and to the literary sector more broadly as a writer, lecturer, editor and intellectual. She will be missed. Vale Jean.

Heather Wearne:

I was Head of School at Southern Cross Uni and Jean and I ran the Writing course there and went on to set up Caldera, a journal that showcased writers from the university and in the Northern Rivers region. Peter’s office/writing room at their house in Byron Bay was our storage space! For the first edition, Jean and I sat at their kitchen table and worked on the layout, design, and made editorial decisions. She was marvellously good at all that and a joy to work with.

But I guess if I was to say anything about those years, it would be about the students whose lives she impacted. She was such a wonderfully generous and inspirational teacher of writing and literature. Her one demand of every student was that if they wanted her to take them seriously they had to read and then talk to her about why Wuthering Heights was the novel par excellence and no argument. She was, and has been, a very dear friend.

Debra Adelaide:

The thing I remember fondly about Jean and the most vivid image of her that has stayed with me from the time I first met her back in the late 1970s, is that of her reading. Jean sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, a paperback curled over in one hand, a cigarette held in the other. She also had more books than anyone I’d ever known back then – the house she shared with Peter Corris down the south coast was filled with them. Once I arrived at this house with a mutual friend, to find Jean at the table as described. It was early spring and the scent of wild freesias filled the place, as she had just picked some from the garden.

Later Jean came to work as a casual lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney, where she taught a novel writing subject for me. With her great command of the form, the breadth and depth of her reading, her critical eye, her warmth and her wit, she was an exemplary lecturer, inspiring both undergraduates and postgraduates. We shared numerous drinks and post-semester lunches around that time, and I was always conscious of, and grateful, that the students were in such capable hands with Jean.

We also shared a love of the novel Wuthering Heights. Jean was one of the few people like me who never get bored with this novel and never get tired of discussing it. I have a feeling we got the novel writing students to study it too, though that may be a misremembering. But I also loved how democratic she was in her reading tastes, and that we shared a joy of so-called trashy fiction and commercial crime novels. All these years later I still associate the scent of freesias with Jean’s place down the coast, and with that memory of her sitting there totally engrossed in a book. 

Alex Adsett:

Jean Bedford was an incredible author, critic, and champion of Australian literature, and in one fateful lecture at a Queensland university 27 years ago, changed the course of my life. In 1998, Jean gave a guest lecture to an English lit class at the University of Queensland, where I was studying Arts/Law, and sparked two key lightbulb moments.  

She spoke about the life of the writer – the drive, the almost obsession, to get a story out and onto the page. The frustration of writing so strong you wanted to throw the pages across the room, but also that the minute you finished one book, you started another. This was revelatory, because as a lifelong and obsessive reader, I always had the vague assumption that I would one day become a writer. Listening to her talk, and even then knowing there are many different ways of being an author, I realised that I just did not have that drive to create, and I didn’t have the stories in me to get out. My first lightbulb moment was that, fundamentally, a writer needs to write, and that was not me. 

In the same speech, though, Jean made a throwaway comment about her publisher – and right then was lightbulb number two. Despite already working in a bookshop, it suddenly truly dawned on me that there was a whole world out there of people-who-make-books-happen. And just like that, I had a life goal – to work in the publishing industry and be part of the world of books.  

I have been grateful every day since that I found my path in life.  Six months later, I took myself off to London to try to break into the industry. When I got an entry-level job at Simon and Schuster, I discovered it truly was a world where people lived and breathed books – good ones, bad ones, cheesey ones, important ones. And I have never looked back. I then worked at Penguin in Melbourne, Wiley in Brisbane, started my own consultancy in 2008, and Alex Adsett Literary agency in 2011. Both are still going strong.

As a consultant, I have helped thousands of authors negotiate better publishing contracts. As a literary agent, I run a thriving agency of four agents representing more than 60 creators, including Melissa Lucashenko, Isobelle Carmody, Dinuka McKenzie, and many more. I have never forgotten Jean’s words sparking the absolute certainty that publishing was the career for me, and am so grateful for that throwaway comment she made in a random lecture 27 years ago. Working in books is perhaps not the most lucrative of careers, but I couldn’t imagine a more fulfilling one. 

Sandra Leigh Price:

Jean Bedford had a walk that was slightly mysterious, dressed in signature black pants and top, sunglasses veiling her eyes with a cigarette between her fingers, gave her an air that she was skimming the earth, part gum-shoe part blue-stocking, though she was the most down to earth of people. 

I met Jean Bedford and Peter Corris when they moved into an old workers cottage a few doors down from me in 2013. It didn’t take long for our paths to cross, little snippets of conversation about books and writing on the street, amidst our busy lives, between swapping books, or sharing biscuits or neighbourhood news, it was always a pleasure to hear what she had been reading or thinking about and her quiet encouragement about my own writing. When she asked me to write something for the Newtown Review of Books, she patiently allowed me to write about Oliver Twist, it being Dickens 200th birthday, and it was a gift that gave me a precious window of time to think, to write. 

Jean lent her support to me as younger writer, encouraging me when my first book came out, prompting me to apply for things, writing me a letter of support for a grant application. I know that I am not alone in being the recipient of her generosity. 

Jean always had some good tid-bit of information to share, whether it was a book coming out that she enjoyed or a review she had read. I recall having a rather good conversation with Jean about the subject of her book If with a Beating Heart, Claire Clairmont, in the blazing sun on a Newtown street, how Claire was the real heroine of the whole Shelley/Byron story, and later had the pleasure of her answering my questions about the re-release of Sister Kate for my blog. 

Jean wrote of women who tried to slip the traps waiting in a woman’s life, and that it was not the outcome but the attempt that mattered. That pivotal attempt held the whole tricksy world in it. I remember asking her once if she was still writing and was surprised by her answer. She said she had done with it, an ever so slight disappointment in her voice, she was busy enough, she said – with her daughters and grandchildren, with Peter, with the Newtown Review of Books – but Jean never gave up on books, or words, she just turned the page to different story.

Kim Kelly:

Jean, you were a giant of Australian letters when I began as an editor in the 90s, an inspiration for following passion rather than fashion when I began to write myself, and you’ll never know how much it meant to me to receive your kind and careful editorial words when I submitted my first reviews for the NRB. You made me feel included, as only true lovers of literature do. Thank you.

Robert Goodman:

Jean Bedford was a star in the Australian literary scene. A passionate advocate for Australian stories but also with an eye for what makes some of those stories great. For many years Jean volunteered as a judge in the Ned Kelly Awards for Crime Fiction and brought to that task both a critical eye and deep knowledge and love of the genre. Personally, I am indebted to Jean for encouraging me to join the Newtown Review of Books family and try my hand at longer-form book reviews. Jean always provided insightful and positive feedback on my work. She will be greatly missed.

Bernard Whimpress:

I never met Jean, nor have I met Linda. It’s a peculiarity of editor/writer relationships which sometimes seem like friendships but are conducted over long distances. Physical paths may never cross.

My first review for NRB was in August 2015 and 45 have followed. I’m an historian who chiefly writes about sport and while 18 reviews have been on sports books, 16 deal with history and politics, eight with biographies and memoirs, three novels and one pamphlet. My fourth review, of Mark Forsyth’s The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the delight of not getting what you wanted, was nearly as long as the original work.

That’s been the strength of NRB. Jean and Linda have allowed me free expression: to digress, to experiment, to occasionally provoke. They’ve made only minimal editorial corrections, and exchanges have always been cordial. Respect and trust (on both sides) has been foremost and that has been the key to my continuing contributions, to enjoy being part of the team.

Karen Chisholm:

In the early 1990s literary change was coming in Australia, and there were a number of very important female writers at the head of that charge, Jean Bedford being one of them. Her Anna Southwood series of novels, featuring a female private investigator, was vitally important in resetting expectations and understanding of crime fiction in general, and in writing from a woman’s viewpoint in particular. In all her books, including the standalone thriller Now You See Me, and especially Sister Kate, her writing is both suspenseful and clever, always taking a female perspective, never with a sense of overreach or preaching. At the time of initial release of the Anna Southwood series (the first, Worse Than Death, was published in 1991), it was often noted that it was all very well (and right) to laud the female Golden Age crime writers, but Jean and her contemporaries were writing about a world that was recognisable, in a style that was quintessentially Australian, featuring capable and real women, living their lives in the way they wanted.

As an editor, and a compiler of short story collections, Jean had an acute eye for flow and context, and her compilations have always delighted and enthralled readers. In particular, her generosity of spirit produced See You at the Toxteth, a final collection of short stories and Godfather columns by Peter Corris, which was both hilarious and profoundly moving. Luckily for younger readers, the re-release of her novels in the mid-2010s provides the chance to access such a vitally important collection of work. My sincere condolences to all who knew her.

Where to find Jean’s books:

Sister Kate has been reissued as an ebook by Ligature as part of the Untapped Literary Heritage Project.

Lume Books has released ebooks of:

The three Anna Southwood novels: Worse Than Death, To Make A Killing, and Signs of Murder

If With A Beating Heart

Now You See Me