In 1879 Tasma went to live in Europe, and has since known Australia only as an occasional visitor. Becoming interested in social questions during a residence in France, she wrote in the _Nouvelle Revue_, suggesting emigration to the colonies and engagement in the fruit-growing industry there as a means of relieving some of the poverty of the Old World. She afterwards lectured on the subject in French at the invitation of the Geographical Society of Paris. So successful were the lectures that she was induced to repeat them in various provincial centres, as well as in Holland and Belgium. This work occupied from 1880 to 1882, and Tasma was presented by the French Government with the decoration of Officier d'Académie. The King of the Belgians also honoured the lecturer by receiving her in special audience to discuss means of improving communication between Belgium and Tasmania. In 1885, after revisiting Australia, Tasma was married to M. Auguste Couvreur, a distinguished Belgian politician and journalist (he has since died), and four years later began her career as a novelist by the publication at London of _Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill_, which proved to be one of the most notable books of its season. This novel remains the best example of the author's humour and power of describing character that she has produced. It has none of the marks of a first effort. Written when Tasma was about thirty-two, it embodied some of the best fruits of many years' keenly critical study of life, in addition to the culture gained by travel and a wide course of reading. Of plot there is little--there is still less in some of the later novels--but sufficient variety of incident is given to afford scope for unusually rich faculties of sympathy and philosophic observation. In her desire to present only real persons moving in a familiar world she merits, in _Uncle Piper_, praise almost equal to that accorded by Nathaniel Hawthorne to the novels of Anthony Trollope when he spoke of them as being 'as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting that they were being made a show of.' It is, however, less of Trollope than of Howells that Tasma reminds the reader in this first story. The character of the wealthy _parvenu_ uncle, sensitive, boastful, resentful, and obstinate, yet tender-hearted as a child, irresistibly recalls _Silas Lapham_, that wonderfully natural and sympathetic presentment of a commonplace man. There are numerous points of resemblance between the two, especially when they are shown contrasted with their aristocratic friends. The delightful comradeship of Lapham and his wife, with its curiously dry New England expression, has its counterpart in Piper's affection for his sister and their pride in each other.