The essays in this collection are, in many cases, the first sustained discussion of the writers and their work, much of it resulting from primary research in rare book collections and local and overseas archives. In comparison to scholars and academics in Canada and Australia, those wishing to research New Zealand authors in the period this volume covers have in the past found only a limited number of sources and guides. , edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998) provides succinct references to individual authors and entries on major works by the better-known. The biographical details of some (but by no means all) authors under review here can be found in (Wellington: Allen and Unwin/Department of Internal Affairs, 1990) and (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books/Dept. of Internal Affairs, 1993), http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/dnzb/, although there is little or no discussion of literary work. The second edition of , edited by Terry Sturm (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998) sets the authors we are concerned with within a historical narrative in the sections on non-fiction (Peter Gibbons), the novel (Lawrence Jones) and popular literature (Terry Sturm). Their treatment, in the context of a history stretching from pre-European contact to the present, is necessarily brief. Patrick Evans’ (Auckland: Penguin, 1990) is somewhat dismissive of the colonial period, especially of its women writers. His reprise, (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2007), is more respectful, but as a discussion of nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature is necessarily cursory. Jenny Robin Jones’ (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2004) is largely interested in the material conditions of writers’ lives. (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006) by myself and Mark Williams is a discussion of late-colonial writing and includes chapters on Edith Searle Grossmann and Blanche Baughan. Terry Sturm has written a study of G. B. Lancaster, (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003), which surveys both her literary output and her relationship with the publishing world in New Zealand, Australia, the United States and England.

There are some specialised works of reference and critical discussion of the period that emerge from the women’s movement and the centennial celebrations of women’s suffrage in the 1990s: , edited by Charlotte Macdonald, Merimeri Penfold and Bridget Williams (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1991) is largely biographical but has a limited discussion of some aspects of the literature; Heather Roberts’ (Wellington: Allen and Unwin and Port Nicholson Press, 1989) discusses a range of the lesser known nineteenth-century women writers.

During the last decade there has been increasing interest in settler literature among postgraduate students, some of whom are contributors to this project: Daphne Lawless’ ‘’ (PhD Diss., Victoria University, 2003); Teresia L. Marshall’s ‘’ (PhD Diss., University of Auckland, 1995); Kirstine Moffat’s ‘’ (PhD. Diss., Victoria University of Wellington, 1999); Louise O’Brien’s ‘’ (MA thesis, Victoria University, 1996); John O’Leary’s ‘’ (PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2001); Philip Steer’s ‘’ (MA thesis, Victoria University, 2004); and Hamish Win’s ‘’ (MA thesis, University of Canterbury, 2005).

Katherine Mansfield and Ngaio Marsh both have international reputations which are reflected in Mansfield’s case in scholarly editions of her letters and notebooks—, 4 vols (vol. 5 forthcoming) edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984-1996) and , 2 vols, edited by Margaret Scott (Lincoln: Lincoln University Press/Wellington: Daphne Brasell, 1997). There is a body of critical literature on Mansfield, although much material in the notebooks awaits commentary. In the case of Marsh, there are biographies and autobiographies but less critical commentary than is perhaps warranted. Hyde is the focus of a large and on-going research project, which has produced editions of a substantial amount of hitherto unpublished material. But critical commentary is still ongoing. But the other writers in this collection have attracted little more than the occasional journal article, which we note in the bibliographies of individual essays.

This collection of essays, then, gives a focused detailed reading of a group of writers who in most cases have not hitherto enjoyed critical attention. The assessments are based on primary research, but go beyond the normal remit of reference in being opinionated and argumentative. As is proper for an effective research resource, these essays point to further research directions. The critical disdain that the literature of the colonial period has attracted has been modified in recent years. But there are still areas about which we do not know nearly enough, and there still a variety of archives and collections that have not been fully examined. We hope that the specificity of the discussions here, many based on original archival examination, will be suggestive in this respect. The material circumstances of these writers are crucial to their art. Many of them were journalists or supported themselves by writing for newspapers and magazines both in New Zealand and overseas, Australia, US as well as the more obvious market of England. How were these writers’ relationships with newspapers configured? What kind of literature was published in New Zealand newspapers? ‘Papers Past’, the New Zealand National Library digital edition of a selection of colonial newspapers, suggests that many of the authors featured in this volume had lengthy complex and mutually rewarding relationships with newspapers. What does this suggest about the publication opportunities for books? What was state of publishing institutions in the colonial world? Many of the books here had overseas publishers and New Zealand readers. What was the relationship between the two, in terms of the commercial world the books existed in, and in terms of the way both reader and writer saw their audience? How did the dual audiences of dual reputations, local and overseas, of writers such as G. B. Lancaster, Louisa Baker or Ngaio Marsh work? This material here relates to the general consideration of audiences and readership and has links with various national book history projects. , eds. Penny Griffith, Ross Harvey and Keith Maslen (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1997) is a useful resource in this respect to read against the specific essays in this collection.

It is obvious that many of writers in this collection wrote in terms of orthodoxies and ideologies particular to the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Religion is a feature of many of the writers’ work, both in terms of the Christian denominations that were part of the fabric of settler New Zealand society, and in terms of the alternatives which suggested themselves to the doubtful Victorian or the spiritually inquiring early modernist. Many of these women wrote to further the cause of feminism, but it is feminism in its nineteenth-century garb, with the obligatory add-ons of suffrage and temperance, or in its early twentieth-century garb where the cause of sexual freedom is often expressed in rhetorics that seem to the modern ear empurpled and overblown. How far and in what form are the interests we as twenty-first century readers have — in gender, ethnicity, nationalism, the postcolonial — reflected in these writers? Only detailed reading of their work in its primary context will enable us to avoid a presentism that distorts the basic positions from which they wrote.

Ultimately these essays are about literature and the relationship of these writers with the dominant literary forms of Victorian culture. The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre’s Nineteenth Century New Zealand Novels Online Collection is a useful complementary source for further work in this area. How does settler writing over the century adapt formally, from the autobiographies and letters of the early generation of settlers to the more mannered and consciously invented worlds of later in the century? These writers deploy a variety of generic modes, from romance and adventure stories exploiting the strangeness of place (for an overseas audience but also for an increasingly urban local readership), to what Patrick Brantlinger calls ‘imperial gothic’, to the novel of the New Woman, to intimations of modernism. Are these conventional critical descriptors correct or useful? Did these writers develop new forms or simply inherit and imitate forms from elsewhere? What connections do New Zealand writers in this period have with other colonial literatures — Australia, Canada, South Africa, India? There is a great deal of exciting work to be done in this area, and the editors hope that this collection of essays will both contribute to and stimulate such activity.

A colonial rather than a New Zealand writer, Lady Barker nevertheless occupies a distinct place in nineteenth-century New Zealand literature, thanks to her lively account of station life in the pioneering period, .

Lady Barker was born Mary Anne Stewart in Jamaica, where her father was a colonial official. During her infancy and young adulthood she travelled to England several times, where, as she records in an autobiographical chapter in , ‘an old gypsy woman’ told her fortune, predicting that she would ‘never be rich’ and that she would ‘wander up and down the earth.’ Both predictions came true. Lady Barker never became wealthy, but she travelled all over the British Empire, leaving fresh, readable accounts of her life in places as far apart as New Zealand and Trinidad, Western Australia and Natal.

In 1852 Lady Barker married George Barker, a soldier with whom she had two sons. The marriage appears to have been a happy one, but was marred by separation, as Barker had to leave England to serve with the British Army in Russia and India. (He was knighted in 1859 for his services during the Mutiny). At the end of 1860 Lady Barker joined her husband in India. Her stay was a short one, as Barker died there the next year. Lady Barker returned to England a widow, where she lived quietly with her family.

This peaceful, conventional English existence came to an end in 1865, when Lady Barker married a young New Zealand sheepfarmer, Frederick Napier Broome. She took what she was later to describe as ‘the wild and really almost wicked step’ of leaving her children in England and going with Broome to New Zealand, where Broome planned to buy a sheep station. After a long, stormy voyage, the pair arrived in Lyttelton in October 1865 and made the trek over the Port Hills to the new city of Christchurch. There Lady Barker noted the ‘very practical style and tone’ of life and the ‘independence in bearing’ of the people, especially of servants (this last was a theme to which Lady Barker, who had a very English sense of class, returned more than once). It was in Christchurch, too, where the couple stayed for several months, that Lady Barker gave birth to her third son, who did not live long.

In 1866 the couple moved to the sheep station, Steventon, in the foothills of the Southern Alps, that Broome had bought with a partner. The station house was called Broomielaw, and it was from Broomielaw that Lady Barker wrote most of the letters that later formed the basis of .

In 1868, after a severe snow storm had destroyed nearly half their flock, Lady Barker and her husband left New Zealand and returned to England ‘with sadly diminished means.’ Back in London and needing an income, they decided to turn their hands to literature. Broome, who had some poetic talent, wrote verse and worked as a newspaper correspondent. Lady Barker, at the urging of Alexander Macmillan of the London publishing firm of that name, turned her letters from New Zealand into the book she is best remembered for.

, which Lady Barker described as ‘the exact account of a lady’s experience of the brighter and less practical side of colonization’, is a vivid narrative of life in Christchurch and the South Island high country at a time when the remoter parts of New Zealand were still being opened up for European settlement. The book concentrates, generally, on the lighter side of pioneering. In ‘Society — Houses and Servants’ Lady Barker describes a ball she goes to in Christchurch; in ‘Housekeeping and Other Matters’ she talks about her attempts at cooking (the results were ‘curious and nasty’). In ‘A Christmas Picnic and Other Doings’ she tells her readers about a summer ride to a neighbouring station and the magnificent vistas of mountain, bush and plain she passed on the way, while in ‘My First and Last Experience of Camping Out’ she recalls the discomfort she, Broome and some friends experienced when they spent the night on the summit of a nearby hill. The tone throughout is self-deprecating and comic; Lady Barker, though always a ‘lady’, is not afraid to laugh at herself, especially when her middle-class English expectations meet the reality of colonial New Zealand. Favourite themes are the beauty of the hill-country landscapes and the perfection of New Zealand mornings (‘the air is so light and yet balmy, it seems to heal the lungs as you inhale it’).

Light as the subject matter generally is, there are moments when a darker, more painful reality intrudes. In ‘Death in Our New Home’, Lady Barker tells of the death of her new-born son, and describes the anguish felt by herself and Frederick. In ‘The New Zealand Snow Storm of 1867’, she gives a detailed account of the freezing tempest that engulfed Steventon that year. The snow was so deep that Lady Barker and her housemates could barely get out of the station house, and they were so hungry they feared they were going to die of starvation. Trying as such experiences must have been, Lady Barker always maintains her cheerfulness. It is this uncomplicated joie de vivre that made such a popular book, and it was reprinted many times and translated into French and German.

Encouraged, perhaps, by the positive reaction to , Lady Barker published ten more books between 1870 and 1875. Several of these books made use of Lady Barker’s experiences at Steventon, presenting new New Zealand material or reworking incidents and events which had already appeared in . In (1871), a hot Christmas Day in New Zealand is evoked after parallel descriptions of Christmas Day in other parts of the British Empire. In , a collection of tales about diverse subjects which was also published in 1871, ‘The Grave by the Rakaia’ tells of the lonely death of a high country traveler. In (1872), a survey of recent exploration in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australasia, Lady Barker devotes three chapters to New Zealand, telling her readers about the country ‘as it was’, moving on to New Zealand ‘as it is’, and finally giving a pen portrait of the history, population and economy of ‘the Middle Island’ (the South Island). In (1874), a collection of tales about ‘boy friends’ Lady Barker had known, or claimed to have known, one story, ‘Louis Roden, My Emigrant Boy’ describes the adventures of a young Englishman who goes out to make a new life for himself in New Zealand. Louis, who functions as a kind of male alter ego for Lady Barker, has many of the experiences Lady Barker had while at Steventon (he ‘burns the run’ for instance, and hunts wild cattle). It is an efficient recycling of familiar New Zealand material.

More considerable than any of these books was , which Lady Barker published in 1873. Clearly written to capitalize on the success of , it focuses, as the title implies, on the ‘idler hours’ of pioneering life. Lady Barker tells her reader about bush picnics and eel-fishing (‘a monotonous pursuit’); she discusses tobogganing in winter, ‘swaggers’ (tramps) and the many pets she had at Broomielaw (Lady Barker was very fond of animals). often reworks or expands upon material from , and its tone is similarly engaging. It lacks the latter’s immediacy and liveliness, however. This is partly due to the fact that it is not based on real letters, unlike the earlier book, and partly because Lady Barker tends to moralize in a somewhat sententious manner. In ‘A Bush Picnic,’ for example, she praises loggers for their hard work (‘sobriety and industry are the first essentials of success’) and lectures the reader on the folly of sending out to the colonies young gentlemen with no capital and no practical skills.

In 1875 Lady Barker followed her husband to Natal in South Africa, where Broome was working as Colonial Secretary to the Governor. Subsequently she accompanied Broome to Mauritius, Western Australia (where Broome was Governor, and had a town named after him), and to Trinidad, where Broome was again Governor. Lady Barker appears to have enjoyed her life in these places (she became especially fond of Western Australia) though she later admitted that the ‘official routine and luxury’ of these years did not compare to her ‘rough, unconventional’ existence in New Zealand. She published several books during this period, none with New Zealand themes.

In 1896 Broome died suddenly in Trinidad, and Lady Barker returned a widow a second time to England, where she lived the rest of her life. In 1904, under the name Lady Broome, she published , a substantial work about the many countries she had lived in. The book’s first chapter, ‘A Personal Story,’ is an autobiographical piece which gives interesting information about Lady Barker’s life before, during and after her stay in New Zealand. Four later chapters deal with ‘old’ and ‘modern’ New Zealand, recycling material from and while adding more recent observations about the country and the progress Lady Barker deemed it to have made in the 40 years since she first saw it. The tone is wistful and melancholy; excitement and adventure, the writer plainly feels, are in the past.

Lady Barker died in London on 6 March 1911. Her death was noted, especially in New Zealand, where was and continues to be much loved. ‘She was a woman whose literary style reflected a bright and happy temperament,’ stated the obituarist in the Christchurch Press of 9 March, adding that she had possessed ‘a decided gift of humour.’

Lady Barker was a conventional, if talented, writer. Some of her attitudes, especially those relating to class, can seem patronizing to modern readers. But in she caught very exactly what is was like to be young and adventurous in one small part of the British Empire.

Louisa Baker was the first New Zealand woman to succeed in making a career out of writing novels, publishing seventeen books between 1894 and 1910. Significantly, this success was only possible when Baker left New Zealand to pursue her literary career in England, a departure that later authors, such as Jane Mander and Katherine Mansfield, were to follow. The contemporary appeal of Baker’s fiction lies in its blend of topical issues with romantic melodrama and exotic New Zealand settings. The novels, at their best, are intellectually challenging. Baker is primarily a theological writer who critiques the retributive austerity of Calvinism and advocates liberation through the transforming power of a Gospel of Love. These ideas underpin Baker’s moral feminism. In her writing, love is the central ingredient to human happiness. Marriages without love are doomed and should end. With love relationships flourish and transgressions arising out of love, even sexual lapses, should be forgiven. This originality of thought is at times matched by stylistic innovations. Baker experiments with multi-perspective narratives, interior monologues and dream sequences and uses music and landscape (particularly bush, mountains and rivers) in a symbolic way. However, her prose can be overtly didactic and her writing relies on sentimental Victorian clichés. Death-bed reunions, discoveries of long-lost heirs, murders, miraculous escapes and revelations of long-hidden secrets abound. Playing to her overseas audience, Baker locates her narrative action in the stark beauty of the South Island mountains and the isolated grandeur of the North Island bush. In her novels New Zealand represents raw emotion, primitive, instinctual artistic talent and freedom from claustrophobic ideologies. However, her middle class, European heroes and heroines frequently depart for the cultural environs of Australia and England or arrive in New Zealand from overseas cities on missions of intellectual liberation.

Born on 13 January 1856 in the Warwickshire town of Aston in England, Louisa Alice was the second of five children born to Elizabeth (nee Bratt) and Henry Joseph Dawson. A carpenter by trade, Henry Dawson was also a part-time town missionary and preacher. Hints in Baker’s fiction suggest that this religious background, which shaped her early thinking, was strongly Protestant, probably either Methodist or Brethren in denomination.

When Louisa was seven the Dawson family came to New Zealand through the assisted immigration scheme, arriving in Lyttleton on the Lancaster Witch in October 1863. They settled in Christchurch, where Louisa was educated. From a young age Louisa’s literary ambitions were evident, seen in her submission of stories and articles to newspapers.

On 7 November 1874, at the age of eighteen, Louisa married John William Baker. He was thirty-three years old, a house painter by profession and an amateur Greek scholar. Two children were born of the union, a son, John William Walter(known as Jack), in 1875 and a daughter, Ethel Elizabeth, in 1877. During the 1870s Baker continued to pursue her literary goals, publishing stories such as ‘’ and ‘’ in the

Baker’s marriage was an unhappy one and in July 1886 she left her husband and moved to Dunedin with her daughter. Louisa and John were never reconciled, although they did not divorce, and the family lived apart from this point, Baker making regular trips to Christchurch to see her son. John Baker died in Ashburton in 1916.

The move to Dunedin was motivated not only by Baker’s need to remove herself from an unhappy marriage but also by her desire to further her career as a writer and journalist. In Dunedin she began work for the , an association that continued until her death. William Fenwick, the editor, employed Baker to help edit the children’s page and write a column for women.

Baker was responsible for transforming the children’s page. Up until her arrival in Dunedin the page had primarily been a collection of activities to amuse children. Baker believed that the page should also have an educational value. She invented the persona ‘Dot’ and ‘Dot’s Little Folk Page’ was born. As ‘Dot’ she invited children to write to her. Her own children were the first correspondents, Jack praising a recent boat trip (16 July 1886) and Ethel describing her joy in receiving a present (23 July 1886). Soon ‘Dot’ was receiving letters from children throughout Otago. Some asked for advice about issues such as the care of pets and correct behaviour, while others contributed poems and stories. As ‘Dot’ Baker answered these and contributed her own children’s stories to the page. Such was the success of Baker’s innovation that ‘Dot’s Little Folk Page’ became an institution in the Otago Witness and then in the , the title ‘Dot’ long outliving her creator.

A similar revolution was initiated by Baker in relation to the ladies’ page. Prior to Baker’s tenure with the paper this largely consisted of society gossip and hints for home management. Baker wrote a personal letter to readers, using the pseudonym ‘Alice’, and included her own original works of fiction. These letters reflect Baker’s moral, feminist outlook and perhaps provide hints of the reasons behind the breakup of her marriage. Her letter of 23 July 1886 speaks of the gentle and uplifting influence a woman can have on her husband as long as he is not ‘a brute or animal who merely regards a wife as a domestic drudge’.

Over the next few years ‘Alice’s’ letters demonstrate an increasingly militant feminism. In a September 1893 issue of the Otago Witness Baker asks ‘Why do men ask that women should sit in the shadow of their throne?’ and calls on women to escape from the ‘chains’ that bind them and to embrace change. At this time Baker was active in the women’s movement in both Dunedin and Christchurch. She was present at the September 1893 meeting of the Canterbury Women’s Institute Economic Committee when Kate Sheppard received a telegram informing her that women had finally won the franchise. The women at this meeting praised Baker’s work for the Otago Witness, declaring that other papers needed to treat women as intellectual beings rather than as devotees of fashion and gossip.

Baker’s serial ‘Chalk’, which ran over several issues of the Otago Witness in 1886, is typical of her fiction at this time. The story, revolving around the fortunes of a poor Birmingham girl, combines affecting pathos with a serious engagement with social issues, particularly the abuse and neglect of children.

During the early 1890s Baker began to pursue more serious literary ambitions, writing her first novel (later published as ). However, she struggled to find a publisher in New Zealand and set sail for England in 1894. Her daughter Ethel accompanied her, but her son Jack remained in Christchurch where he later married. Baker never saw him again, but wrote regularly and sent him copies of all her novels.

Baker’s predicament was typical of the dilemma facing creative artists in colonial New Zealand. The New Zealand reading public had an appetite for things British and the few publishing companies based in New Zealand were reluctant to publish works by unknown local authors. Baker had no option but to pursue her literary dream overseas. She commented that she was ‘bred under the Southern Cross, held cheaply there — and labelled in London’ (McCallum, p. 27). This ‘labelling’ refers to her adoption of yet another pseudonym, that of ‘Alien’. This speaks of both her sense of dislocation from her New Zealand home and her sense of isolation as a professional and artistic woman in a patriarchal environment.

Successfully securing a publisher when she reached London, Baker’s first novel, , was published in 1894. This is the most stylistically innovative and intellectually challenging of Baker’s novels, establishing tropes that she returned to again and again in subsequent novels.

A Daughter of the King is a bildungsroman tracing the spiritual and moral evolution of the heroine. Florence’s dying father leaves her with the legacy of a loving God, but this is obscured by the harsh puritanical faith of her adoptive mother. An unhappy sacrificial marriage triggers rebellion and Florence departs for Melbourne to seek meaning in a succession of philosophies. Truth, feminism, humanism and work are all trialed and found wanting, but eventually Florence hears a preacher talk of the Gospel of Love and recaptures her father’s faith: ‘I am a daughter of the King! Eternal Life, Eternal Truth, Eternal Love, are mine by right in God’ (294). Baker’s feminist beliefs also emerge clearly. Although the redeemed Florence returns to bring succour to her dying husband, Baker advocates separation and divorce as a necessary end to an unloving relationship, which she regards as ‘respectable sin’ (153). Florence is typical of Baker’s heroines. Instinctively cultured and fiercely independent, she eventually needs to leave the Canterbury environs that have nurtured her as a child for the artistic opportunities of Melbourne, where she becomes an acclaimed violinist. Yet, running counter to her feminist individualism, there is a strong self-sacrificial strain in Florence which is nurtured by her conversion to a Gospel of Love that idealises renunciation.

Baker’s writing style is, at times, not quite up to the intellectual demands of her feminist and theological ideas. However, she does make use of interior monologues, multi-perspective narrative voices and mystical dream sequences, which are innovative for her time. While the New Zealand of her novel remains an exotic backdrop representative of a primitive, instinctual Nature (as opposed to Australia which represents Art and Culture), Baker is capable of using landscape in a powerfully symbolic way. In , the opening scene by the Avon River in Christchurch establishes a metaphor for the vicissitudes of life. Likewise, this text establishes Baker’s trademark connection between music and ideal femininity. Florence’s ability to play the violin is fostered by the beauties of the New Zealand natural environment and is indicative of her independence, rich emotional life and rejection of Calvinist austerity and self-denial.

A Daughter of the King was greeted with warmth by English reviewers, who described it as a ‘clever novel’ which showed ‘remarkable promise’ (, 26 April 1895). One critic tempered his praise with a request that Baker ‘avoid “yellow-asterics” and “problems” ’ in the future and another was confused as to the author’s gender and place of residence, referring to ‘Mr Baker of Christchurch’, but the novel was accepted by an American publisher and sold so well in England that it went to a second edition (New Zealand Mail, 30 November 1894, 26 April 1895). This publishing pattern set the trend for Baker’s subsequent novels, all of which draw on the ideas and motifs of A Daughter of the King. For the next fifteen years she produced a novel a year.

Baker’s second novel, (1895) provides the back-story of the preacher who brought theological enlightenment to Florence in A Daughter of the King and introduces a second type of Baker protagonist, the reclusive and spiritually tortured male. St John’s Melbourne mission is an act of atonement for his accidental killing of a friend. Eventually he is reunited with his wife and returns to the New Zealand of his childhood. The theme of self-sacrifice, this time to expiate the sins of another, is also central to (1896). A novel of the goldfields, Baker uses the realistic setting to critique materialism and greed. Baker’s moral feminism also emerges clearly in . The celibacy of Sister Lilian in applauded, but is seen as ultimately cold and sterile when contrasted with domestic love. A similar celebration of passion over intellect underpins the Canterbury bildungsroman (1898). Baker’s insistence that women are sexual as well as intellectual and moral beings is unusual for its time, the New Zealand feminist writers Ellen Ellis and Edith Searle Grossmann viewing sex as a male invasion of female independence. The river imagery in the text reinforces the central message of female passion, as well as conveniently freeing the heroine to fulfill that passion through the death of the husband she does not love in a convenient flood.

The issue of marriage and male-female relations is central to Baker’s next two New Zealand novels. (1899), set in the spectacular landscape of the Lake Manapouri forest, is the most risqué of Baker’s novels, the only one to deal with a sexual relationship outside of marriage. Baker’s feminist and theological beliefs intertwine in this novel, the heroine absolved of her moral transgression because she acted out of love: ‘some sins seem purer than other virtues and lift higher’ (356). In contrast, (1901) asserts the sanctity of marriage. Caroline Grey forbids Geraldine Ward, rival for her husband’s affections, to come near Howard: ‘You are on another woman’s territory…I am his wife.’ (287-8). The sub-plot of this novel is a fascinating analysis of the consequences of stealing the plot of a best-selling novel from an unpublished manuscript.

(1900) and (1902) return to the theological issues of Baker’s first novels. Both of these are damning critiques of Calvinist theology. The Devil’s Half Acre is an exposé of fire and brimstone preaching. John Jermyn lambasts the residents of a South Island mining community with his message of a God of wrath and judgement as he seeks to propitiate that God for his adultery with and murder of his childhood sweetheart. Not in Fellowship attacks the exclusivity of Calvinist congregations, which stand in need of the liberating influence of the natural environment and new ideas. This is provided by another of Baker’s favourite character types, a cultured Englishwoman with an enlightened outlook and a musical talent, this time for song, indicative of her ethic of inclusion and forgiveness. In both texts Baker’s Gospel of Love ultimately brings liberation and redemption.

Not in Fellowship was Baker’s last New Zealand novel for five years. In 1902, feeling that her memories of New Zealand were fading, she turned to English settings for inspiration. The novels which followed are much less complex and intellectual than their New Zealand counterparts and do not make use of symbolic landscapes. A conventional blend of romance and melodrama, these plot-driven narratives are clearly written for financial rather than ideological reasons. Some of the standard Baker moral themes are present — renunciation of a great love in (1903), the virtues of female independence and the evils of class division in (1904), the compensations of artistic creation in (1909), redemption through suffering in (1910) and relinquishment of revenge in (1906) — but they are much less substantial than in the New Zealand texts, always secondary to the demands of the romantic narrative.

In 1903 Baker re-established her connection with the Otago Witness, contributing a weekly column, ‘Alice’s Letter From England’, to the ladies’ page. While, as in her novels, English news (particularly cultural events, fashion and royal gossip) formed a substantial part of her letters, Baker continued to promote women’s suffrage and offered comments on contemporary issues such as war, divorce and politics. She also continued to write for English periodicals and worked as a reader for a London publishing house.

Baker reverted to a New Zealand setting in two later novels. This re-engagement with New Zealand was coupled with a return to complex moral issues. In (1907), all the standard Baker ploys re-emerge: the reclusive male in need of redemption, the instinctively cultured, musical, independent woman, the relinquishment of self-interest out of love, the freedom offered by ‘the boundless space and the blue vaults of the Southern Cross’, the nurturing possibilities of the bush, and the need for artistic talent (in this instance an operatic voice) to be developed in England (2). The novel also contains a dramatic set piece in which the Tarawera eruption temporarily parts the lovers. Baker’s moral feminism is particularly evident in (1908), another anti-Calvinist text in which the mountains of the Otira Gorge symbolise the liberating possibilities of a God of love. The heroine, Alma (another of Baker’s cultured and enlightened Englishwomen with a talent for song and piano playing), contemplates a free-love union but eventually realises that this would be ‘a sin against her womanhood’ and that only in marriage can a ‘perfect union’ be found (183).

In spite of its strong moral message, The Perfect Union was attacked by New Zealand critics as belonging to a class of ‘decadent books’ in which ‘evil’ is ‘wrapped up in high-flown language’ (Smith, 71). This antagonism is typical of the New Zealand reaction to Baker’s writing. She was chided for painting ‘portraits of women who trifle with the sacredness of marriage’ instead of presenting ‘unblurred portraits of the ideal woman’ (McCallum, 27). In her essay ‘’ fellow novelist Clara Cheeseman attacked Baker for being ‘somewhat too fond of what may be termed regrettable incidents’ and complained that Baker’s ‘chief characters are almost always inconsistent’ (279). However, by 1925 Baker’s English and American popularity began to filter through to New Zealand. Fourteen of Baker’s novels were on display at the 1925-6 South Seas International Exhibition in Dunedin. Baker was even hailed as ‘a colonial George Eliot’ in recognition of the moral purpose of her writing (, 30 May 1926).

In later life Baker lived alone at Britannia Cottage in Deal, Kent, but maintained regular contact with her daughter Ethel, who had married Englishman George Felix Edgar. She earned a living from the proceeds of her books and through freelance writing. Baker was active and in good health until she suffered severe burns while extinguishing a fire from a portable oil stove just after midnight on 21 March 1926. She was writing her column for the Witness at the time. After a neighbour saw her distress signal the next morning she was taken to the War Memorial Hospital where she died on 22 March. Her obituary in the Otago Witness described her as a woman with ‘an engaging personality’ who was ‘a conscientious and faithful worker’ (30 May 1926). The paper published her last story ‘The Wrong Card’, a romantic tale about lovers reunited during a World War I air raid, as a tribute to her literary talent.

Without the theological context and feminist agenda of her novels Louisa Baker would be little more than an exponent of Victorian melodrama. Her romantic narratives, melodramatic endings and use of sentimental clichés are exposed in her English novels. However, in her New Zealand novels the ideas and stylistic innovations redeem the sometimes overwrought prose. Her advocacy of divorce or separation to end an unhappy marriage, tolerance for sexual lapses, plea for equality within marriage, and insistence on female sexuality were radical for their day. Likewise, her critique of Calvinist doctrine and behaviour was at the forefront of a long New Zealand tradition of anti-Puritan writing. Baker’s enduring appeal is largely through the historical significance of her theology and moral feminism. Her largeness of vision was not entirely matched by her literary skill, but, like so many of her heroines, she made a name for herself in England and America, a rare achievement for a colonial New Zealand woman writer.

Edith Searle Grossmann wrote the two most significant New Zealand novels to come out of the nineteenth-century women’s movement. and are powerful critiques of gender inequities, in spite of their didacticism and melodramatic excess. The first novel attacks male abuses of power, while the sequel presents Grossmann’s vision of a world with no gender or class divisions. Throughout, the compelling, psychologically convincing character of Hermione Howard provides the focal point. In her life as well as her art Grossmann upheld feminist ideals. One of the earliest New Zealand female Master’s graduates, she used the written word to campaign for women’s education. An independent career woman who worked as a teacher, journalist and writer, Grossmann kept her maiden name after her marriage and lived most of her life apart from her husband. Her journalism and fiction also reveals a passionate concern for New Zealand’s cultural identity. , her final novel, creates a myth of New Zealand as a rugged, natural wonderland. This world of bush and mountains strips away the hypocrisies of English society, breeding men and women of integrity and passion, but also ‘dispossesses’ and eventually eliminates Maori (Stafford, ‘Going Native’, p. 168).

Edith Howitt Searle was born on 8 September 1863 in Beechworth, Victoria and she spent much of her childhood in the Australian bush. She was the fourth child and third daughter of Mary Ann (nee Beeby) and George Smales Searle, both of whom were 40 when she was born. Her father was a newspaper editor and the family moved first to Melbourne and then New Zealand as he pursued his profession. The Searles settled in Invercargill in 1878, where Edith attended the Grammar School.

In 1879 Edith Searle was sent to Christchurch Girls’ High School to finish her education. However, the principal, Helen Connon (later Macmillan Brown), admired Edith’s intellect and persuaded her to work towards entry to university. Connon was the first female Master’s graduate in the British Commonwealth and believed passionately in the need for women to develop intellectually. Edith became head girl of Christchurch Girls.

In 1880 Edith was awarded a junior scholarship to Canterbury College and began studying towards a Bachelor of Arts. She was one of only four female students at the College (by the time she graduated this had burgeoned to over 100), but soon gained a reputation for her literary skill, coming second to Joseph Penfound Grossmann in the 1881 Bowen Essay Competition. Successfully gaining a senior scholarship in 1882, she won that year’s Bowen prize for an essay on ‘’. In 1884 she graduated with her Bachelor of Arts degree and enrolled in a Master’s programme. She also joined the debating society, taking the affirmative on issues such as the importance of higher education for women and the necessity of the Married Women’s Property Act. Her professor, John Macmillan Brown, described her as one of his most talented students, with a particular gift for ‘the imaginative and philosophical’ (, 7 March 1931). She was awarded her Master of Arts in 1885, with first class honours in Latin and English and third class honours in Political Science.

From 1885-1890 Edith taught at Wellington Girls’ High School, first as assistant mistress, then as second assistant. During this time she also contributed theological and philosophical essays to magazines. In an article in the entitled ‘’ Edith asserted that ‘Alone God — God the personified father, God, the power and righteousness — suffices’ (February 1889, 91-2). However, she was also critical of the way in which religion had been perverted in order that it could be used to hurt and subdue women and the working classes (‘’, , June 1889, 253-7).

Edith’s interest in theology is also apparent in her first creative writing ventures. A poem, ‘On The Death of Hope’, appeared in the 1 February 1890 issue of . This reveals a melancholy acceptance that life is shrouded in ‘bleak skies’ of ‘misery’, but also a belief in the need for God and faith in the midst of despair. This blend of pessimism and religious sentiment is also a distinguishing feature of Edith’s first novel, (1900), published in Christchurch. This is a moral tale, more tract than fiction. The heroine, Angela Mount, an inherently pure and noble girl, is converted at a Salvation Army rally in Fielding and departs on a proselytising mission to Australia where she is murdered by a drunk on a Sydney beach. Edith Searle’s feminism in this early novel is narrow, but foregrounds later developments in her writing. Angela’s status as passive victim is used to protest against male brutality and the evils of alcohol. Throughout the novel red and white colour symbolism reinforces the message of the need for female moral virtue in a corrupt world.

Edith Searle’s sanctimonious sentiments and writing style in Angela have much in common with New Zealand prohibition and salvation novelists of this era, such as Bannermann Kaye and Bertha Cameron. However, the novel also connects with the fiction of Arthur Adams and George Chamier through its depiction of an indigenous natural environment. Angela goes for long walks through a distinctively New Zealand landscape of matai and totara and delights in the song of the tui, and her brother John writes highly romanticized poetry about the ‘Tui bush’ (24, Stafford and Williams, 187-8). Searle’s castigation of Fielding as insular, judgemental and gossip-ridden established a tradition of critiquing small town mentality that later writers, from Jane Mander to Frank Sargeson and Bill Pearson, were to follow.

On 23 December 1890, in Wainuiomata, Edith married Joseph Penfound Grossmann. He had been a fellow student at Canterbury College, graduating with triple first-class honours, and was now a teacher at Wellington Boys’ High School. Edith continued to work after her marriage and retained her maiden name, now being known as Edith Searle Grossmann. The couple moved to Christchurch, where Joseph taught at Christchurch Boys’ High School. Edith’s feminist sentiments were echoed by her husband and in 1892 they both became founding members of the Canterbury Women’s Institute. Edith co-ordinated the literary department of the organisation.

In 1893 Edith published a novel which outlined her feminist views. In Revolt is set in Australia and makes its feminist protest through the tragic history of Hermione Howard. Parts of the novel descend into Victorian melodramatic and sentimental excess, but the portrait of the flawed, suffering and struggling central character has psychological depth. The novel was reviewed favourably in the New Zealand and British Press, but had a very small readership.

Eager to go to university and shape her own life, Hermione is forced into marriage with Bradley Carlisle by her aunt. Bradley is a type rather than an individual, a sadistic brute whose sole purpose is to demonstrate the evils of male domination. From the first he is determined to ‘quell’ Hermione and be her ‘master’ (64, 181). When she disobeys him, he uses his superior physical strength to exact obedience and to punish her. His brutality is heightened by alcohol and in a drunken rage he murders his son. Grossmann is scathing of the system that upholds Bradley’s authority, particularly the law, which offers women no protection, and orthodox religion, which demands female submission. Hermione’s inner journey is a liberating progression away from domestic submission to independent thought, but the action which results from this transformation is punished by a patriarchal universe. In the tragic denouement Hermione wanders through the Australian wilderness in a state of nihilistic despair and physical exhaustion that is strongly suggestive of impending death.

Edith’s only child, Arthur Searle, was born on 5 December 1894. There is some suggestion that Arthur was mentally handicapped, although this may be a rumour perpetuated at a later date by Joseph as an excuse for financial difficulties. The marriage became increasingly unhappy and Edith left her husband in 1897. She moved to Wellington where she tutored university classes and pursued her own studies with Dr Innes. In 1898 Joseph was convicted of two counts of fraud and was sentenced to two years imprisonment. He was never reconciled with his wife.

Edith moved to Auckland in 1898 where she worked as a freelance journalist for New Zealand and British magazines and journals, such as the , and . Her articles covered a range of topics, including Maori education, the development of parks, and literary criticism. She was described by a contemporary as a ‘leading writer on literary or historical matters and social movements’ (Thomson, 310).

In June 1902 Grossmann was sent as a special reporter to write up King Edward VII’s Pacific Island coronation ceremonies and celebrations. She then traveled to England, basing herself in London. There is some suggestion that she left New Zealand to seek treatment for her son, but she was also motivated by her desire to further her career as novelist and journalist. She was a founding member of the New Zealand Circle at the London Lyceum Club and after another colonial women’s club, The Austral, was established in 1903 she used this as her writing headquarters. Here she came in contact with other expatriate authors, such as Kathleen Inglewood (Kate Evelyn Isitt), G. B. Lancaster (Edith Lyttleton) and Dora Wilcox. Grossmann urged Australasian authors trying to make a name for themselves in Britain to join a club or society of authors, stressing that the difficulties inherent in finding a publisher were ‘doubled for a colonial’ (Evans, 58).

Grossmann continued to contribute freelance articles to a range of newspapers and magazines, particularly the , the and the . Issues relating to New Zealand remained favourites. ‘’ offers a particularly important examination of New Zealand literature. Grossmann calls for a New Zealand literature that embodies the new spirit of the country, declaring that English stories, history and news are becoming increasingly irrelevant in a land of young New Zealanders who are imbued with a growing nationalism (, May 1905, 350-3). In ‘’ the forces shaping this emerging New Zealand identity are analysed. Grossmann regards the scenery, the independent and versatile pioneering spirit and the emphasis on class and gender equality as defining influences on the New Zealand psyche (Empire Review, October 1905, 138-148).

Following the death of her former headmistress in 1905, Grossmann wrote a . In this she pays tribute to Macmillan Brown’s pioneering work in the field of female intellectual and moral education. While Grossmann is admiring of Macmillan Brown’s emphasis on cultivating women who were able to ‘take an independent stand in life and at the same time manage a household’, she also warns of the cost to women of trying to maintain both a career and a marriage (36). Macmillan Brown continued to work as headmistress of Christchurch Girls after her marriage, but her health was ultimately undermined and she was forced to resign. Above all, this biography is a tribute to the transforming power of education in women’s lives in general and Edith Searle Grossmann’s life in particular.

In 1907 Grossmann’s sequel to In Revolt was published. is a much more consciously feminist and therefore more theoretical novel in which character development and narrative action are secondary to the feminist purpose. The novel opens with a Preface which reminds readers that society is in ‘the midst of a great struggle which aims at overthrowing the power of a small privileged class over a large dependent one and the power of one privileged sex over a more dependent one’ and locates the novel within this struggle. The title draws on Heinrich Heine’s definition of the Holy Ghost as the spirit of liberty. Hermione, miraculously saved from her spiritual and physical disintegration at the end of In Revolt, seeks both freedom from oppression and the freedom to follow the light within. She embraces a new humanist faith in a ‘Divine Spirit’ within each individual, which prompts men and women to live a ‘higher life’ (296-7). This ‘higher life’ manifests itself through ‘pure love’ (182). As this term suggests, Grossmann’s attitude to sexuality in this novel is extremely negative. Sex is linked to male power and is described as a ‘monstrous, unregulated, unnatural passion’ (261). Ideal relationships should be chaste and spiritual and women have a special role in elevating society because of their higher moral nature. The novel also advocates the ongoing need for social and legal reform. Hermione establishes a commune in Melbourne to provide refuge for abused women and ‘equal education’ (202). Her dream is shattered when Bradley finds her and the law refuses to grant her request for divorce, granting him control over her property. In a final act of disillusionment or protest Hermione kills herself.

A Knight of the Holy Ghost was the most internationally acclaimed of Grossmann’s novels. It was hailed by the as a book that ‘will take rank…with the really great novels of the time, crashing down the bonds and fetters that bind the victims of prostituted marriage’ and was praised by the for its ‘Zola-like fullness of detail and variety of situation as well as directness of purpose’. New Zealand reviews were also complementary, the Christchurch drawing parallels between Grossmann’s novel and the fiction of George Eliot and Emily Bronte. A second edition, under the amplified title of , was published in 1908.

Grossmann’s final novel, (1910) is a very different novel to its feminist predecessors, not least in its fresh, unforced style. In some ways the heroine, Adelaide Borlase, conforms to Grossmann’s ideal female type. She is cultured and well educated, but also makes her home a haven of domestic bliss for her husband. However, she accepts and plays on her status as delicate female and exhibits no desire for activity beyond the domestic sphere. Likewise, Grossmann’s earlier negation of sexuality is reversed. The Heart of the Bush celebrates the sexual element in heterosexual relationships, particularly female sexuality. Adelaide is frequently overcome with physical and emotional passion for her husband, in one scene drawn to touch the ‘muscular and sun-browned flesh’ of Dennis’ arm and then to ‘put her lips to the thick blue vein’ (236-7). Adelaide and Dennis’ marriage is a study of a relationship that does work because there is love, respect and a willingness to compromise on both parts.

The Heart of the Bush is also an important novel in terms of New Zealand’s emerging literary nationalism. Adelaide and Dennis are both individuals and representatives of types. Recently returned to the land of her birth from England, Adelaide is symbolic of fragility, art, society and civilisation. Dennis, the New Zealand-bred son of a farm labourer, is her symbolic opposite, standing for rugged strength, nature, the primitive, the barbarous. Jane Stafford argues that Dennis possesses an ‘acquired indigeneity’ by ‘virtue of a Romantic association to the landscape’ and his Celtic heritage (Stafford, 168, 166). In choosing to marry Dennis rather than Englishman Horace Brandon, Adelaide is accepting the local over the imported. The second part of the novel then poses the question of how colonial culture, once affirmed, is to be defined. Dennis is drawn to the developing export-orientated meat market, setting up the Farmers’ Refrigerating Meat Company and the Wainoni Flat Creamery. Adelaide rejects this mundane reality for a love idyll in the South Island bush and mountains, which symbolise childhood innocence and transcendent emotion throughout. Her Edenic vision ultimately triumphs. The novel ends with an escape into a utopian natural landscape where the lovers read poetry (literature and nature being regarded as compatible throughout). Stafford describes this as a ‘saccharine fantasy’, a ‘feminised and sentimental’ Maoriland where ‘Maori do not exist even as ghosts’ (170-2).

The contemporary reception of Heart of the Bush was muted and this is undoubtedly one of the reasons why Grossmann never wrote another novel. More recent commentators, such as Jane Stafford and Mark Williams and Nelson Wattie, have focused considerable attention on the novel’s preoccupation with an emerging indigenous cultural identity, while feminist critics remain uncomfortable with the novel’s perceived betrayal of the feminist cause through its romantic, domestic focus.

Grossmann left England to return to New Zealand in late 1910. She lived in Auckland and continued to work as a freelance journalist. Grossmann was also a devoted civic campaigner, especially in the cause of conservation. She was increasingly plagued by severe arthritic pain, another of the contributing factors behind her failure to produce any more novels. Dying in her sleep on 27 February 1931 at her home in St Helier’s Bay, Grossmann was buried at Hillsborough.

The year after Edith’s death her estranged husband, Joseph Grossmann, was again dismissed from a university position, this time Professor of History and Economics at Auckland University College, due to fraud. Joseph tried to excuse his actions by claiming that he was financially desperate due to his need to support his mentally disturbed wife and handicapped child. This myth has been perpetuated by several critics but is completely unfounded. In his obituary of his former student, John Macmillan Brown speaks of Edith Searle Grossmann’s mental alertness and warm good humour. Macmillan Brown describes Edith as a woman of ‘high ideals’ who ‘was ever on the side of the weak and the defeated; and it was this tenderness for the defenceless or helpless that was the ruling emotion to all her crusades’ (, 7 March 1931).

Grossmann’s fictional oeuvre is perhaps most remarkable for its diversity. Both stylistically and thematically her novels demonstrate an evolving sensibility. Angela: A Messenger is orthodox in its religious sentiment and clichéd in its use of character stereotypes, little more than a prohibition salvation tract. The narrow feminist sentiments present in this early novel blossom in the two Hermione narratives. Here the erudite didacticism and melodramatic excess is redeemed by the complex ideas. In Revolt is a novel of protest, articulating its feminist message through Hermione’s tragic history and ultimate rebellion. A Knight of the Holy Ghost is much more theoretical in its approach, militant in its feminism and global in its vision of a transformed society. The suspicion of sexuality that dominates Grossmann’s moral feminism is reversed in The Heart of the Bush, which is unusual for its time in its celebration of female desire and physical passion. Here Grossmann’s interest shifts to an emerging indigenous New Zealand identity. Quiet in tone and domestic in scope, The Heart of the Bush combines a realistic depiction of the everyday realities of a marriage relationship with a utopian evocation of the grandeurs of landscape. Grossmann’s feminist texts and final novel offer windows into New Zealand’s cultural and political past, but also retain a modern relevance and appeal in their preoccupation with gender equality, class divisions, the shaping power of the landscape and national identity.

Edith Lyttleton, writing under the penname of G. B. Lancaster, was until the 1970s New Zealand’s most successful popular fiction writer. A prolific author of both short stories and novels, she achieved her success by writing colonial adventure stories in defiance of familial and societal expectations. Living in London, she became an established author in the English short-story market and several of her stories were adapted for the movies. After a significant break in writing occasioned by the deaths of two family members, she effectively began a second career with the publication of four highly popular historical novels. Throughout her career, her writing was concerned with the emergent colonial cultures of Australia, Canada and New Zealand, the unsung heroism of ordinary people involved in colonisation, the interaction between those people and the land, and the place of women in those cultures. Until very recently, Lyttleton has been to all intents and purposes forgotten since the time of her death.

Born at Clyne Vale, a sheep station near Campbell Town, Tasmania on 18 December 1873, Edith Joan Lyttleton was the eldest of four children. Her parents, Westcote McNab Lyttleton and Emily (née Wood), were both from families of the Tasmanian colonial landed gentry and had married in January 1873. Emily was born in Tasmania in 1848, the fourth of seven children, her father having originally come to Van Diemen’s Land to be a military officer at the convict garrison. Westcote was born in 1846 in Ireland and grew up in Nova Scotia, being related to the wealthy and influential McNab family that lived there. His family moved to Tasmania in 1859 and once there his father joined a property syndicate. Its acquisitions included Clyne Vale and the 20,000-acre sheep station, Rokeby, in Canterbury, New Zealand. Edith spent the first six years of her life in Tasmania while her father managed Clyne Vale, before the family moved to New Zealand in order for him to manage Rokeby.

Lyttleton’s childhood was characterised by oppressive domestic circumstances. Brought up according to a puritanical Anglican faith, all the children were rigorously disciplined and the girls were especially subject to punishment. This regime was instigated by their mother, who believed that females ought to lead lives of self-sacrificial service. One consequence of this upbringing was that Lyttleton did not receive a formal education, but she developed a love of literature through the influence of her father. His death in 1897 stunned the family and caused Emily to forbid her daughters to marry in order that they might care for her.

Lyttleton had been a compulsive writer from childhood, a habit developed in part as an escape from her home situation, and at age fourteen she won first prize in a Christmas story competition held by a local newspaper, the . The competition was judged by poet Jessie Mackay, and the two formed a friendship that lasted until Mackay’s death in 1938. Emily strongly opposed the possibility of her daughter becoming known as a writer, but because of the financial insecurity brought on by Westcote’s death Lyttleton was nevertheless allowed to begin to write seriously.

Lyttleton’s earliest professional writings were short stories submitted to the . She published these under the penname of Keron Hale until a photograph identified her as Hale. At that point Lyttleton adopted the name she would write under for the rest of her life, G. B. Lancaster, derived from the hero of her first prize-winning story. Because of her mother’s views about the impropriety of women writers, Lyttleton retained her anonymity for thirty years. As a consequence of her gender-neutral penname and choices of subject and setting, many readers assumed that Lancaster was a male. Lyttleton began to publish regularly in Australian magazines. She was the most prolific New Zealand contributor to and the until 1909. The two magazines published sixty of her stories.

Her first book, (1904), was a collection of short stories loosely focused around the group of men employed at the fictional Mindoorie sheep station in Southland, New Zealand. The stories emphasise masculinity, mateship and the power of the landscape, and the underlying ethos of the collection is stated most explicitly in its central story, ‘.’ In it, Hantock and Lane explain the colonial character to the bemused Man from England: ‘A colonial is not a product of civilisation; he is a product of the soil. If the rest of the world saw this, it would go to the country that produced him, and not to his forebears’ (154).

Lyttleton’s first novel was (1905), and it was her only novel whose central protagonist was a writer. It concerns a Faustian pact between young Australian bushman and aspiring writer Kin Severne and a philanthropist, Haddington, who offers him three years of support in exchange for seven years of service if Severne fails to succeed. Severne does fail, and is pressed into the service of Haddington’s exploitative South Pacific enterprises. These experiences require him to change his literary style from an amoral naturalism to a more sympathetic mode, a move which Terry Sturm argues presented ‘a challenge to prevalent thinking in New Zealand, and especially in Australia, which linked literary nationalism with naturalism as the preferred literary mode’ (71). Published in England, only a few copies of A Spur to Smite reached Australasia but it was widely reviewed in E