FIGHT TO REGAIN NATIONALITY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24227, 20 February 1940, Page 15

FIGHT TO REGAIN NATIONALITY

EXPERIENCE OF AN AUTHORESS After an eight years’ fight to regain her British nationality, Miss Winifred James, Melbourne authoress, has returned to Australia. She has been abroad for 34 years. Miss James, who has written many popular novels, was born in Melbourne, and Is the daughter of the late Rev. Thomas James, of Windsor. She married Mr Henry de Jan, of Louisiana, United States of America, in 1913. Under the British law compelling a woman to take her husband’s nationality, she became a citizen of the United States. Then, after the death of her husband, she went to live in London, and began her campaign to regain her British nationality. This started a controversy in England. Authors, politicians, and public men became Involved in an agitation to have the law altered, but although it has been modified in some ways in relation to finance, the nationality clause still stands. Winifred James, finally, was allowed to regain her nationality through the offices of Sir John Sanderson Allen, but grateful as she was for that, she still went on with the fight to have the law altered.

Even now she is back in Australia, she wants to see this change brought about.

Before she went abroad, Winifred James ran a tea-shop in Adelaide, and she had only been a short while in London when her first novel, “Bachelor Betty,” was accepted by Constable’s. It ran into four editions in four weeks. Since then. Winifred James has written a number of other books.