watercolourist, was born at Leith Hill Place, near Dorking, Surrey, ninth and last of the children of Rev. George Keylock Rusden and Anne, née Townsend. She came to New South Wales with her parents and siblings in 1834 and moved to Maitland when her father was appointed parish priest there. Her initialled Tangorin and Glendon Brook from near the Station (1847, pencil & grey wash, Mitchell Library [ML]) looks like a student work, a copy of the sketch Tangorrin [sic] and Glendon Brook (1841) by her reputed teacher Conrad Martens . By 1851 she was improving (at least in the eyes of her fiancée, Rev. Arthur Edward Selwyn) although the portrait she had done of him for his mother had been received very ambiguously. 'How differently you construe my dear mother’s remarks on your little sketch; not handsome enough, eh? rather, can this be Arthur, with such a fine round nose (my mother has an aquiline nose) like mine? ... you must do another, to show that the nose is not a creature of the imagination when I come, will you?’, Arthur wrote from Brisbane in October 1851. The two were married at Tamworth on 30 June 1852. They had no children.
Mrs Selwyn continued to sketch after her marriage and most of her surviving work dates from this time. A collection (ML) includes watercolour views of Grafton and the Clarence River district where her husband was minister from 1854-67; of Newcastle, where they lived from 1867 and where Arthur was dean of Christ Church Cathedral; and of Brighton, Victoria, where her brother, George William Rusden, was municipal councillor (1860-62). All were for friends and family, many being enclosed in letters to her mother for distribution. A view of the interior of the Selwyns’ church at Grafton, for instance, was sent to Anne Rusden about March 1855; her mother commented that it gave 'an admirable idea of its appearance’. Her watercolour Church and Court House, Grafton (ML) is still a close imitation of Martens but later works are less conventionally picturesque, more personal, naive and informatively detailed.
A large collection of Selwyn’s watercolours of Grafton and district is held at Schaeffer House, Grafton, headquarters of the Clarence River District Historical Society. They include The Post Office, Grafton (1860), In Prince Street, North Grafton (c.1863), Grafton Church (1863) and Yulgilbar, Clarence River (c.1866). Some of her views, such as Riverstone (1862), were copies of watercolours by her friend Mary Tindal and all these simple and sometimes quite lively sketches are very close in style to Tindal’s. Mary Ann Avery (Mrs Harry Smith) also did at least one Grafton view (1860) in a very similar style. Mrs Selwyn is also represented in the album of Marrianne Campbell whom she would have known before her marriage. After her husband died in 1899, Rose Selwyn published Letters of the Late Dean Selwyn (of Newcastle) Chiefly to his Wife (Sydney 1902).
