Rose-Soley was born Agnes Rebecca Rose in Scotland in 1847 and grew up in France. She attended
Newnham College, Cambridge, but unable to complete her studies due to ill health. Arriving in Sydney in about 1885, Rose-Soley was theatre critic for the
Illustrated Sydney News under the pseudonym Pistachio in 1889 and 1890. She was married in 1891 in
Balmain to John Fisher Soley, a journalist and naval artillery volunteer who had earlier enlisted and served in the Sudan in 1885. It was his second marriage: he had divorced his first wife, Alice Helena Soley, for adultery in 1890, naming actor Stilling Duff as co-respondent. The couple lived at Monad, a waterfront cottage in Clifton Street,
East Balmain, where they entertained "all Bohemian Sydney" at "chic dinners". In 1893 she composed the lyrics and music for a "Marching Song" for the people who migrated to Paraguay that year to establish a settlement known as
New Australia. She and her husband went to Samoa, where they lived on
Manono Island for two years. They then moved to San Francisco, where they wrote for newspapers for five years before spending a year in San Diego. After some time in London, they returned to Sydney in 1910. During World War I she wrote patriotic poems, some of which were printed as
Stray Chords in 1923. Over the years her poems appeared in
The Sydney Morning Herald,
The Sydney Mail,
The Daily Telegraph and
The Bulletin in Australia, and in London's
Speaker and
Lyceum Journal, San Francisco's
Call and
Overland Monthly, and Honolulu's
Independent ==Death==