Jessica Margaret Anderson (née Queale; 25 September 1916 – 9 July 2010) was an Australian novelist and short story writer. Born in Gayndah, Anderson lived the bulk of her life in Sydney apart from a few years in London. She began her career writing short stories for newspapers and drama scripts for radio, especially adaptations of well-known novels. Embarking on her career as a novelist relatively late in life - her first novel was published when she was 47 - her early novels attracted little attention. She rose to prominence upon the publication of her fourth novel, Tirra Lirra by the River, published in 1978. Although she remains best known for this work, several of her novels have garnered high acclaim, most notably The Impersonators (1980) and Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories (1987), both of which have won awards. She won the Miles Franklin Literary Award twice, and has been published in Britain and the United States. Jessica Anderson died at Elizabeth Bay, New South Wales in 2010, following a stroke. She was the mother of Australian screenwriter Laura Jones, her only child.

Jessica Anderson was born Jessica Margaret Queale in Gayndah, Queensland, on 25 September 1916 to Charles James Queale and Alice Queale (née Hibbert). Anderson's father, Charles Queale (1867–1933), was the youngest child of a large Irish family, and the only one to be born in Australia. Upon their arrival in Queensland, the Queales set up residence at Gayndah in a house to which Anderson fleetingly refers in Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories as "the Old Barn". Coming from a family of farmers, Charles Queale acquired a veterinarian's certificate and took up a position in the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Stock. Anderson's mother, Alice Queale (1879–1968), was born in England, and emigrated to Queensland with her family at the age of three. The daughter of a Church of England music teacher, she had learnt the violin as a child and sometimes played for her family as an adult. Before marrying, Alice worked in the public service and joined the Queensland labour movement, in which she met Anderson's father, Charles. Staunch Anglicans, Alice's family disapproved of her marriage to Charles, and for the rest of her life Alice's mother refused to see Charles or any of Alice's children.

Jessica was the youngest of four children; her elder siblings were Alan Lindsay Queale (1908–1982), Vida Joan Queale (1910–1954), and Patricia Queale. While each features to some extent in her semi-autobiographical work, Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories, Anderson's relationship with her brother, Alan (Neal in the memoirs), who was eight years her senior, is the least developed in the collection. Indeed, Anderson stated in one interview that for many years, she and her brother "lived in different channels of the same family," and that it was only during the later years of his life, when they were the last surviving members of their immediate family that they grew close. Alan Queale rose to some renown in his own right as a prolific archivist, mostly of Australiana and artefacts of Queensland's history, and many of his collections remain in the State Library of Queensland and the National Library of Australia. Beyond the brief glimpses afforded by Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories, little is known about Anderson's relationships with her two sisters, Joan and Patricia. Her eldest sister, Joan, died in her early forties, when Anderson was in her thirties, tragically leaving behind several young children. Her other sister, Patricia, also died of cancer some years later. Anderson writes very affectionately of her sisters.

For the benefit of their children's schooling, the Queale family moved from Gayndah to the Brisbane suburb of Annerley when Anderson was five years old. Anderson's father, Charles, somewhat begrudgingly left his father's "meagre acres" and took up a job in an office in Brisbane's CBD, from which "he instructed others how to farm, how to treat disease in stock and crops, but still longed to return to farming himself."

For the remainder of Anderson's childhood, the Queales lived at 56 Villa Street, in a house abutting Yeronga Memorial Park. On the opposite side of the park was Yeronga State School, the school at which Anderson began her formal education. In spite of its reputation as one of the best state schools in Queensland at the time, Yeronga State School rapidly became a site of dread and frustration for Anderson, who suffered from a speech impediment that caused strife for her in the classroom. Anderson's speech impediment (as well as her occasional flirtations with truancy) became such a hindrance to her education that her parents decided that she was to be home-schooled by her mother for a year, while attending weekly speech therapy sessions in the city. In spite of these efforts, Anderson's slight stammer was to stay with her for the rest of her life; several observers commented that the impediment lent her speech a careful and deliberate air. Following her primary school education, Anderson attended high school at Brisbane State High School. Upon graduation, she attended Brisbane Technical College Art School.

Anderson's father died when she was just sixteen. Suffering from chronic bronchitis and emphysema, and having survived diphtheria and typhoid fever, her father's illness is a pall that hangs over many of the tales in Stories from the Warm Zone, and his death was undoubtedly a "bitter blow" to the young girl and her siblings.

Anderson appeared to have a complicated relationship with Brisbane, a city "where brutality and gentleness rested so easily side by side." Although she believed 1920s Brisbane to be quite parochial, she stated that it was not "altogether narrow and rigid." She took the well-thumbed copies of the great Russian novels in Brisbane's public libraries as evidence of the presence of many frustrated people in Brisbane; "people with aspiration beyond their society." Herself a victim of the stifling social expectations of the old colonial town, she has stated that she "would have like to be an architect, but it seemed at the time absolutely impossible for a girl to be an architect, especially in Brisbane."

In 1935, at the age of 18, Anderson left her Brisbane home to live in Sydney. Despite the fact that she spent her childhood in Queensland, she stated in interviews that she felt more affinity with Sydney, the city where she was to spend the bulk of her adult life. There she subsisted on wages from a number of sources, including a slide-painting job, and a job designing electric signs, where she was able to make use of her art school training, and later from work in shops and factories. She and her friends lived at Potts Point in "big seedy decaying mansions with gardens running right down to the harbour." In a city still recovering from the ravages of The Great Depression, life for Anderson was not altogether easy: "Times were very hard," she recalled; "People were poor, but very free. We had a good life."