Introduction

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.

Jane Stafford, Victoria University of Wellington

Lady Barker, 1831?–1911 John O’Leary

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 Alice Baker, 1856-1926 Kirstine Moffat

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, 1863–1931 Kirstine Moffat

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.

G. B. Lancaster (Edith Lyttleton), 1873-1945 Philip Steer

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 England and the United States.

A Spur to Smite marked the beginning of a prolific period for Lyttleton and her next novel came only a year later. Set on a South Otago sheep station, (1907) explores the influence of the environment on those who work there and details the new social codes being established in the colonial world. The novel was less well received than A Spur to Smite, with overseas reviewers in particular criticising the impenetrability of its intensely local language. Her next novel, (1908), was set in the Pacific and the title suggests the novel’s moral concerns. It focuses on the relationship between Australian Rod Maclean, hired by a commercial venture wishing to open up the northern Solomon Islands, and missionary Jack Strickland. Its depiction of the cultural destruction achieved in the name of commerce marks the beginning of a critique of capitalism that Lyttleton was to develop in her later writing. In 1908, her mother sold Rokeby and most of the family – including Edith – left New Zealand to settle in England.

En route to England the family visited Canada, and Lyttleton wrote articles about her travels for the Literary Supplement of the New York . While in Canada she also formed a lifelong friendship with the poet and short story writer Helena Coleman. On the suggestion of New York publisher George Doran, who had read her articles, she visited outposts of the Royal North-West Mounted Police in the Yukon to gather material for a novel. Shortly after her arrival in London, (1910) was published. Begun while in New Zealand, it is the most self-consciously American in style of her novels. Set in the Australian outback, its protagonist is the bushman Jim Kyneton, who joins the police force in Victoria, Australia out of a sense of obligation to the land. The novel proved very successful in England and the colonial market but, ironically, was never published in America.

A long holiday around Great Britain in 1910 provided the material for Lancaster’s first English novel, (1911). A romantic social comedy, it jarred with her reputation for colonial settings and did not sell well. In response, Lyttleton turned to her Yukon experiences, and left England for Canada in April 1911 with the intention of writing a novel. She stayed with Coleman and set herself a demanding writing schedule that took its toll on her health. Nevertheless, the success of the resulting novel, (1913), established her at the forefront of popular fiction writers. It is a tale of two Canadian Mounted Policemen — upright but dispassionate Jim Tempest and fallen but charismatic Dick Heriot — and the society taking shape within the rugged Canadian landscape. The popularity of the novel, in both the United States and England, guaranteed Lyttleton’s financial independence for the next decade, gained her contracts for future novels, and led to the reissue of much of her earlier work.

Following , Lyttleton turned her attention to the potentially lucrative short-story market. Her attempts to establish herself among the English and United States monthly magazines were hampered by the demands of her domestic situation. Nevertheless Lyttleton published twenty-five stories from 1910 until the outbreak of World War I. The war delayed work on her next novel, as she became heavily involved in work for the Red Cross and the support of Dominion soldiers on leave in London. During the war she wrote patriotic journalism and her articles were published in the newspapers of many allied countries.

Lyttleton’s next novel, (1917), was published during the war and Terry Sturm describes it as one of her ‘least known and most underrated novels’ (140). It focuses on Christopher Gascoyne’s involvement in the search for the cause and cure of yellow fever, the breakthrough that allowed the building of the Panama Canal. Its critique of United States’ influence in Central America and the excesses of capitalism was largely ignored by critics, who preferred to emphasise the romance, exoticism and adventure of the plot. Her next novel, (1918), was a political comedy set in England that was actually written before the war. Lyttleton felt it was out of step with the post-war political environment, but it was released due to pressure from her publishers.

Between 1919 and 1925, Lyttleton returned to the short story genre. Now recognised as an established author, she was able to command top prices. Several of her stories were filmed at this time. Recognising the demand for stories of the Canadian frontier, at least half of her more than eighty stories from this time were set in the Canadian North West. By contrast, only three stories were set in New Zealand, reflecting the lack of a New Zealand magazine to publish in. Lyttleton visited Canada for new material in mid-1920, but her strenuous schedule led to a physical collapse that left her debilitated until March 1921. Over the next two years she struggled to balance her domestic obligations with the demands of her short-story contracts.

Following the death of her sister in November 1923 and her mother four months later, Lyttleton suffered an emotional breakdown and her writing career came to a complete halt by 1926. As she gradually recuperated, she used her new freedom to travel and until 1940 lived nowhere for more than a year at a time. From 1926 she moved between New Zealand and Australia, and spent time in Tasmania in 1927 conducting research for a book about her Australian family origins. Unable to settle in a New Zealand literary community that she felt to be pretentious and amateurish, Lyttleton returned to England in 1930.

Lyttleton burst into the public limelight once more with the release of (1933), the fruit of her Tasmanian research and the first of her ‘Dominion-historical’ novels. Set in mid-nineteenth century Tasmania, it follows the fates of several wealthy families placed within a carefully historicised narrative of the growth of the new colony. Its ironic tone marks a sharp discontinuity from her previous novels, paralleled by a shift in focus towards women characters. It is also sharply critical of the convict economy that underpinned early Tasmanian society. Pageant was chosen as a Book of the Month by the Literary Guild of America and was awarded the Gold Medal of Australian Literature Society for the best Australian novel of the year.

Between 1932 and 1934, Lyttleton’s writing was interrupted by legal struggles against an unsatisfactory contract, as she sought to secure a greater return for herself and the ability to negotiate Australasian printing rights separately to those for England. Her next historical novel, (1934), was set in the Yukon and, although it sold less well than Pageant, Lyttleton’s new contract meant that she did better out of it financially. Returning to Australia in 1933, Lyttleton was accorded celebrity status and, now able to adopt a more public profile, for the first time she allowed photographs of herself to be published.

In 1934 she began research in New Zealand for her next novel, but it was in Australia that she wrote the majority of (1938). Spanning six decades of the early settlement and colonisation of New Zealand, it follows the Lovel family as its members struggle to both adapt to and shape the new country. Evidence of successful adaptation is found in the poetry of the first New Zealand born generation of the family, Roderick and Tiffany:

To every exile the land they were leaving would be for ever the first, the dearer land. But here (so far as Jermyn knew) was the first voice of those who were no exiles, to whom New Zealand was the only land they knew. They knew the Maori too, egad, thought Jermyn, reading. (161)

Promenade is trenchant in its criticism of patriarchal Victorian society and the ‘Holy Immolation of Marriage,’ and it is especially notable for its diverse, independent-minded and resilient women characters.

Leaving New Zealand for the last time in 1938, Lyttleton visited Nova Scotia to research her next novel before she took up an offer of accommodation in Norway. While there her health broke down, due to a combination of a weak heart, high blood pressure and nervous stress; the outbreak of World War II meant she was only able to return to London in December 1939. Once again she became involved in the war effort, at the expense of both her writing and her health, and she was hospitalised in early 1943. The next year her novel of Nova Scotia, (1944), was published. Reflecting its continuity with Pageant and Promenade, Terry Sturm argues that one of Lyttleton’s ‘central aims in Grand Parade is to give expression to the unrecorded history of women in the process of colonisation’ (263). Lyttleton’s health declined rapidly after the publication of Grand Parade, and she died on 10 March 1945. Later that year New Zealand critic F. A. de la Mare, in , described her as ‘the foremost novelist of New Zealand.’ (3)

Having written over 250 short stories, 14 novels, poetry and journalism, Edith Lyttleton stands as one of New Zealand’s most prolific and internationally successful writers. She succeeded in the face of a family and society that struggled to reconcile her gender with her occupation and subject matter. Her rapid descent into posthumous obscurity reflects the popular register of her work and the neglect of this genre – and of pre-1930s New Zealand literature in general – that has characterised much New Zealand literary criticism. However, the ‘popular’ label belies the consistently serious concerns of her novels: the delineation of the emergent colonial cultures of Australia, Canada and New Zealand; the portrayal of the injustices of colonisation; and the depiction and criticism of the treatment of women in such societies. With the publication of her biography and the increasing attention now being paid to New Zealand’s earliest writers, Lyttleton seems due to be repositioned as one of New Zealand’s significant literary figures.

Jane Mander, 1877–1949 Philip Steer

Jane Mander is a novelist whose work was published between the World Wars. She overcame the geographic isolation of her birthplace and the limitations of her education to pursue academic studies and a literary career overseas. Leaving New Zealand on a scholarship in her thirties, she published six novels while living in New York and London. She was also a prolific journalist, reviewer and literary critic for various New Zealand newspapers, and she continued these roles on her return to New Zealand in the early 1930s. Her novels set in New Zealand are unique in their evocation of the north of the country during colonial times, and they comprise an early critique of the puritanical aspects of New Zealand society. They were initially received coolly in New Zealand because of their moral content, but she eventually gained recognition in her lifetime for her first novel and it is for this that she is still well known today.

Mary Jane Mander was born in the township of Ramarama in the province of Auckland, New Zealand on 9 April 1877, the eldest of the five children of Francis (Frank) Mander and Janet (nee Kerr). Frank’s father, John Mander, had emigrated with his wife, Jane, in 1847 as a member of the first detachment of New Zealand Fencibles. The Fencibles were a group of retired soldiers on British Army pensions, assisted by the New Zealand government to settle around Auckland in return for the promise of their military services in the event of conflict with Maori. Frank was born at Onehunga, Auckland in 1848 and the family settled at a farm in Papakura, Auckland four years later. Despite his family’s poverty, Frank’s entrepreneurial skills meant that he owned one hundred acres by the time of his marriage. Janet’s parents had emigrated with her, aged two, and her three siblings in 1857. After two years, the Kerrs settled at Ramarama, south of Auckland. Although their house was ransacked soon after by Maori during the New Zealand Wars, the family remained there and Frank married Janet in Ramarama on 18 May 1876. Soon after their marriage, Frank turned from farming to the logging of kauri, a valuable hardwood tree that grew in forests to the north of Auckland. This career was to dominate family life until Mander was a teenager.

Frank’s pursuit of kauri resulted in the Manders moving at least twenty-nine times, with Janet responsible for creating a home in often trying conditions and often at short notice. Frank initially worked at Awhitu, at the southern end of the Manakau Harbour, but in 1883 the family moved north to Wellsford. While there, Mander began to attend primary school. A year later, the family moved to Port Albert on the Kaipara Harbour. From there, they moved to isolated Pukekaroro, where Mander may have attended Kaiwaka School and was later to set her first novel. At age nine, Mander moved to Point Ernie, at the head of the Kaiwaka River, where the family stayed long enough for her to make friends with other residents. From Point Ernie they returned to Port Albert, but after a short time they moved again to Mangere and Mander began to attend Onehunga School in March 1889. Three years later, the family returned again to Port Albert.

Such a nomadic lifestyle meant that the family possessed only a few books — among them Shakespeare, , Milton, and the — and Mander learnt portions of them all. By 1892 Mander had reached the end of her primary schooling, and the combination of her father’s financial insecurity and the lack of a district secondary school spelt the end of her education. However, back in Port Albert she took a position as a probationary teacher at the primary school and was supported in her own study by the principal, George Reid. Moving to Avondale in 1896, Mander taught at primary schools and, after studying at night school, passed her teacher’s exams in the same year. Four years later, the family moved for the final time to the northern town of Whangarei; at this point Mander left teaching to concentrate on her writing.

Once in Whangarei, Frank became interested in local politics. In 1902 he successfully stood in the Marsden electorate for the opposition Reform Party. To support his candidacy, he purchased a local newspaper at the same time, the . Despite journalism being a male-dominated profession at the time, her family connections meant that Mander was able to become involved in the production of the newspaper. She worked primarily as a sub-editor and journalist, but lent a hand wherever necessary. In 1905 her family moved into a house built by Frank, and Mander commandeered its rooftop gazebo as her writing room. There she was able to write regularly, although virtually nothing from this time appears to have been published.

The workload of the newspaper took its toll on Mander, leaving her increasingly exhausted during 1906. For a break she travelled to Sydney in 1907. She was entranced by Sydney society, experiencing an artistic community for the first time. While there she met writers and artists, took music lessons, studied French and continued to write. She returned to New Zealand at the end of the year and became editor of the , based in Dargaville. She was to use her experience here and with the previous paper for her third novel. After her Sydney experience, Mander feelings of isolation from intellectual society were heightened. She found a tenuous connection to such society through subscribing to the monthly New Zealand journal, . The late arrival of one issue prompted her to write a letter to the editor (1 December 1909), in which she bemoaned the ‘brain-benumbing, stimulus-stultifying, soul-searing silence’ of her community. This, combined with her lack of success as a writer to date and her awareness of passing time, drove Mander to return to Sydney in 1910.

In Sydney, Mander stayed with William and Ada Holman. William was prominent in the New South Wales Labor Party and later became Premier, while Ada, a journalist, was involved in the feminist movement. Through them Mander became immersed in an intellectual environment of literary debate, socialism and social concern. At this time she wrote several articles for the New Zealand socialist publication, . She used the pseudonym of ‘Manda Lloyd,’ possibly to prevent any embarrassment to her conservative politician father. While in Sydney, Mander was told of the Journalism School commencing at Columbia University. It was of particular interest because it was open to women and because it reserved places for students who had not matriculated. Mander determined to attend it and, refusing a scholarship in German at Sydney University, she returned to New Zealand to gain her family’s support.

Mander eventually persuaded her father to let her go to Columbia and provide her with an allowance, and she sailed for New York via London in 1912. She took with her the draft of a novel, which was rejected by four London publishers during her stay of three weeks. Mander’s disappointment was tempered by her enjoyment of London’s cultural scene, and the visiting Russian Ballet in particular. She entered Barnard College at Columbia in September 1912, where she was required to complete two years’ course work prior to being admitted to the journalism programme. Taking a wide range of papers in the humanities in her first year, she came at the top of her class in all but History. The combination of a heavy workload, her limited financial resources and the fact of being older than her fellow students meant that Mander did not become involved in extra-curricular activities at Barnard. Nevertheless, she formed close friends with many fellow students in Whittier Hall, her dormitory. Friendship with one student, Kathy Davis, led to Mander’s joining their family for the summer of 1913, where she was able to write as and when she wished. Other close friends were Esther and Rose Norton, members of a wealthy family who provided her with an entrance to New York’s upper classes. When Mander left Whittier Hall, Esther moved into a flat with her. Mander was also the chaperone to both girls when they visited France in 1914, a trip they were forced to abandon following the outbreak of World War I.

During 1915 Mander’s academic progress slowed, due in part to the difficulty of supporting herself through part-time work but also to the tension between her desire to write and her approaching journalism studies. During the summer of 1915 she became involved in the campaign led by Mrs Carrie Chapman Catt for the New York referendum on women’s suffrage. Mander supported the principles of the campaign, and also saw it as a way to make a name for herself, thereby enhancing her career as a writer. Eloquent and possessed of loud voice, Mander soon became an established figure on the hustings. As well possessing these talents, she was a figure of interest because of New Zealand’s reputation for pioneering social legislation. Her interest in social reform also led Mander to take up a brief research project into the care of young prisoners at Sing Sing Prison. Burned out from the strain of work by the end of 1915 and living on the breadline, Mander ended her studies.

Mander next found work with the National Guard Relief Committee while the United States prepared to enter World War I. Soon becoming bored with the poorly paid job, she next took up a job with the Red Cross controlling the finances of its workrooms on Manhattan Island. Although the work was exhausting, she nevertheless found time to be involved in New York’s cultural life. In particular, moving flats to Greenwich Village in 1917 brought her into contact with the nascent amateur theatre movement. She was a supporter of the Washington Square Players and became a founding member of its spin-off, the Theatre Guild of New York, in 1919; she also subscribed to the Provincetown Players, who produced the first work of Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell.

Mander continued to write, and in early 1917 she finished the draft of another novel. Although her workload prevented her from revising it, a friend who knew the United States manager of John Lane persuaded her to send it to that publisher as it was. They forwarded the typescript to London with a recommendation that it be published. Mander was notified in 1918 that her novel had been accepted, providing she made several minor cuts, and that it was to be published in spring 1919. Mander was the only new author taken up by John Lane that year. The post-War situation meant that the appearance of the novel was delayed; eventually appeared early in 1920 in New York and six months later in London.

is set in the north of New Zealand in the environment of kauri milling that Mander had known as a child. It begins with the arrival of the recently married Alice and Asia, her young daughter from a previous relationship, at the isolated mill town of Pukekaroro. Her new husband, Tom Roland, owns the mill and runs it with his friend, David Bruce. Alice takes an immediate dislike to Bruce that she is unable to correct due to her rigid sense of decorum and correctness, despite discovering that she has been gravely mistaken in her assumptions about his character. Alice struggles to cope with her marriage — Roland is sexually demanding and lacks understanding — and with the isolation, taking strength from the friendship of Mrs Brayton, a long-time resident who has made her house into an oasis of Englishness. Alice and Bruce come to love each other but she remains in her marriage and their relationship continues to be chaste; they even save Roland’s life when they discover he has taken an overdose of laudanum following a financial setback. As time passes, Bruce and Mrs Brayton work to combat Alice’s puritanism, which they see as preventing her from enjoying life and achieving emotional maturity. Her moralistic outlook is shaken by two events in particular: firstly, when her philandering husband confronts her and Bruce with his knowledge and acceptance of their relationship, and secondly when Asia decides to live with Allen Ross, a married man. Alice comes to a more humane perspective, and she is liberated from her marriage by Roland’s death in an accident. This allows her to marry Bruce, and they move from Pukekaroro to the city of Auckland.

was widely reviewed in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. Many reviewers commented on its maturity for a first novel, and were attracted to the uniqueness of its New Zealand setting. On the other hand, its length attracted some criticism, with Katherine Mansfield demanding in (9 July 1920), ‘Why is her book not half as long, twice as honest? What right has she to bore her readers if she is capable of interesting them?’ The sexual references and the questions of morality raised in the novel generally went unremarked, but in Mander’s home town the Whangarei Public Library initially placed the novel on their discretionary shelf, where it was accessible only by application to the librarian. The largely positive reception encouraged Mander to continue writing despite the book’s modest sales.

Mander continued to earn a living in New York by working part-time and by submitting articles to magazines and periodicals. The occasional use of friends’ cottages away from the city allowed her to write in a more conducive atmosphere. Faced with the challenge of producing her second novel, she was heavily influenced by a discussion with Ralph Block, a scenario reader for the motion picture producers, Goldwyn Company. He argued that she should write with an eye to movie adaptation, for a story that was filmed would both gain her recognition and increase her earnings. Mander wrote her next two novels with this in mind, something she later regretted. Her economic circumstances also forced her to work quickly, as her inscription in the Alexander Turnbull Library copy of her second novel, (1921), attests: ‘This book was written in one month, which may explain why it is what it is.’

is much shorter than , but it shows significant continuities in setting and theme with the earlier novel. Both are concerned with a central female character who discovers that her moral principles are inadequate for the tragedies and passions of everyday. The heroine is Sidney Carey, who is sent to the new school at the northern New Zealand mill town of Puhipuhi to complete her teacher training. She is intelligent, beautiful and aloof but conventional in her morals. Respected in the town, she soon becomes friends with the mill’s charismatic owner, Jack Ridgefield, a Maori woman, Mana Tahere, and an itinerant Englishman, Arthur Devereux. She and Devereux fall in love, and they begin a secret relationship that Carey insists be chaste. Later she is rocked by the discovery that Devereux is married, but he is able to placate her with his tale of an unfortunate marriage and impending divorce proceedings. However, she is further alienated from him by a discovery that leads her to the mistaken belief that he has also been having an affair with Tahere. The novel is notable for two significant set pieces of description, the tripping of a dam in order to float kauri logs down to the mill, and a bush fire that breaks out and threatens the mill and the village. The two lovers are eventually reconciled, after Carey realises that conventional moralism is unable adequately to account for their situation.

The novel was also widely reviewed, and Mander praised particularly for her depiction of the New Zealand setting and for the strength of her characterisation. As the reviewer in (12 June 1921) said, ‘The minor characters, of whom there are many, all show striking freshness and vitality in their presentation, even when the reader gets but a glimpse.’ However, critics in New Zealand were not so complimentary as they struggled with the moral aspects of the novel. The (9 September 1922) commented, ‘It is a pity Miss Mander does not give us a story of New Zealand country life, which would be free from the sex problem motif which has been over-prominent in the present story and its predecessor.’ These concerns began to turn New Zealand readers against Mander’s fiction, although her distance from the country delayed her awareness of it.

Mander continued to live in New York during 1922, dividing her energies between work, her next novel and writing contributions to magazines and periodicals. She was visited by her younger sister, Annie, a nurse who had obtained work at the Presbyterian Hospital in New York for several months. It was the only occasion in her twenty-year exile that Mander saw one of her family. Apart from this interlude, Mander was increasingly enervated by her work routine and the sheer noise of the city. Her third novel, , was published in 1922 but she was frustrated by the growing sense that she had not fulfilled the promise of . Mander felt the need for a change of scene, both to reinvigorate herself and to provide fresh inspiration for her work, so she sailed for London in 1923.

continues Mander’s interest in the north of New Zealand and spans the period from the 1912 elections to the outbreak of World War I. The novel begins with the arrival in Dargaville of Valerie Carr. She has come in order to assist her childhood friend and admirer, Bob Lorrimer, with the running of the local newspaper, the Dargaville News. Carr is twenty-six, beautiful and estranged from most members of her the upper class ‘Remuera set’ family because of her unwillingness to conform to their petty moralism and snobbery. She meets and falls in love with a renowned Australian writer and critic, the handsome Dane Barrington, who is living in self-imposed exile following the social fallout from his second divorce. They begin a secret relationship, but on principle Carr refuses to marry him. Meanwhile, the newspaper becomes involved in the election campaign, supporting the opposition candidate. Barrington is instrumental in his eventual success, having written a series of brilliant editorials in the place of Lorrimer, who contracted pneumonia. After the election Barrington and Carr are secretly married — her sole concession to conformity — but she continues to live with Barrington only on weekends until they are discovered. At this point she moves in with him and eventually gives up her job, but they divide the house between them to maintain their individuality. The relationship gradually deteriorates as the shadow of war looms and Barrington’s health problems cause him to become more aloof. He is diagnosed with cancer, and ends their relationship with a letter asking Carr to leave so that she might follow her ambitions into the wider world.

The critical response to followed the pattern of her previous novel. Reviewers in the United Kingdom and the United States were generally positive, emphasising the setting and the psychological depth of the plot. In New Zealand, however, she continued to be criticised for her treatment of sexual morality. The (1 September 1923) stated, ‘The Post’s London correspondent regrets the combination of what one may call the “sex” novel and the New Zealand bush country as unnecessary and misleading.’ The criticism led Mander to respond from London with a lengthy letter to the (9 February 1924) that set out many of her views about fiction. She defended her treatment of sexual issues by comparing it to the work of European writers such as D. H. Lawrence, and accused her critics of compromising their artistic judgment by writing with ‘an isolated and perhaps provincial average person’ in mind. She also defended her characters against the charge that they did not represent New Zealand society truthfully, arguing that characters should be judged on whether they are plausible rather than whether they are likeable or representative. She concluded with a plea for artistic freedom:

If an artist stops to consider any section of his public, or what his friends would like, or what his publisher would like, or anything at all but that inner light inside himself, he ceases to be an artist and becomes a purveyor of goods…. I am simply trying to be honest and to be loyal to my own experience.

Mander was far from ready to return to New Zealand and what she perceived to be the provincialism of its literary culture.

Having arrived in London in 1923, Mander was introduced to the literary scene by her publisher, John Lane, and his wife. The city proved something of a spiritual homecoming to her, as she soon met literary figures such as publisher Victor Gollancz, and writers Rose Macaulay and Rebecca West. However, London also posed financial difficulties for Mander and she began where she had left off in New York, writing articles and short stories for newspapers and magazines. She became a London correspondent for New Zealand newspapers from 1924, writing regularly for (Christchurch) from 1924 until 1929, and for (Auckland) from 1929. Her articles ranged in subject from London’s cultural life to items of more general interest for readers who still thought of London as ‘Home’. She also became a manuscript reader for John Lane, a job she despised for the low quality of material she was forced to read. She wrote at a later date, ‘I have learned first-hand what I knew second-hand that the muck that is finally seen in print is as nothing to the muck that gets written but not published.’ [ (9 November 1924)] One of the bright spots of the job for her was reading the early work of Georgette Heyer, as a consequence of which the two became good friends.

Mander was in London while she wrote her fourth novel, (1925). She was also labouring under the twin discouragements of the criticism of her previous work in New Zealand and the fact that New York publisher, Dodd, Mead and Company, had allowed their option on it to lapse. is also set in the north of New Zealand, but differs from her previous work in focusing on the gumfields rather than the kauri forests and in having a male protagonist. The central character, Allen Adair, has disappointed the social aspirations of his father by his failure to graduate from Oxford and his inability to hold down a desk job in Auckland. He instead obeys his love of romance and the outdoors by leaving the city and travelling north, becoming the boatman for a Dargaville store that services the widespread rural community. After leaving that job, he takes up the option of running a store in Pahi to service the diggers of kauri gum. He later brings back a wife from Auckland, Marion Arden, who struggles to reconcile her urban perspective with the isolated setting. Adair gradually prospers in his job, but he and Marion become estranged because they cannot understand each other. He instead finds emotional solace in friendship with a reclusive gumdigger, Dick Rossiter. It transpires that Rossiter had taken the blame for a murder and fled England, but his name is cleared with the death of the perpetrator. Marion eventually persuades a reluctant Adair to move to Auckland, but his grief over leaving the gumfields is tempered by the possibility of visiting Rossiter in England.

was Mander’s favourite of her novels after . Her biographer, Dorothea Turner, argues that the novel was Mander’s last attempt to reconcile her New Zealand audience, offering it as ‘an olive branch and as an ultimatum. Here was a book that could shock nobody, but if her country continued indifferent to books about itself she would shift the scenery.’ [86] Mander deliberately avoided the sexual topics that had previously upset New Zealand critics and it received a more positive response from them as a result. In (6 November 1925) it was described as ‘one of the truest New Zealand books ever written.’ Ultimately, however, the stratagem proved unsuccessful, for the novel did not sell well in New Zealand. Mander remained caught between the continuing distrust of her moral agenda and a more generalised disdain for indigenous fiction characteristic of the time, and it was her last novel with a New Zealand setting.

Mander’s health began to decline during 1925. Exhausted by her work and disillusioned by the fate of , she began to suffer from boils. This was to plague her for the remainder of her time in London, but she found a temporary respite when Leonard Moore, her agent, made his house on the Welsh border available for her for a time. Nevertheless, Mander’s lack of financial security meant she was forced to continue her punishing work schedule. In particular, her New Zealand newspaper columns required her to read and review large numbers of novels. Through these columns, Mander had also become something of an icon for New Zealand writers wishing to succeed in London, and they often contacted her. It was in this way that she began a long friendship with Monte Holcroft, novelist and long-time editor of the NZ Listener. Their first meeting occurred when he visited her Chelsea flat seeking advice; she told him to return to New Zealand while he could still afford the ticket. Mander’s flat had also become the focal point of a group of literary acquaintances, including the Australian writer Vernon Knowles, and she hosted a literature and art discussion group attended by a dozen professional women. Having abandoned New Zealand settings for her fiction, it was to her experiences in New York that Mander turned for the subject of her next novel, (1926).

is set in New York during World War I, and its heroine is the English-born but Australian-raised Christine (Chris) Mayne. While she struggles to survive on the pittance she earns working for the Red Cross, her social circle is centred on New York’s moneyed elite and it is with her interactions with this group that the novel is largely concerned. Mayne desires to be a writer, and becomes friends with Lincoln White and Redman Feltz, who are involved in establishing a new journal, The Weekly Critic. Her upper class friends also include Myra Delaye, whom she once kissed on impulse but now wishes to dissociate herself from, and the beautiful Fay White, who is never content despite the opulence of her lifestyle. Mayne falls in love with Gerry Lloyd, an architect who has returned from working as an ambulanceman in France. They conduct a secret relationship, but he is unable to accept her refusal to marry him or to moderate her friendships with other men. Mayne becomes known for her acerbic columns in The Weekly Critic, but she struggles with New York and its frenetic pace. In particular, she is rocked by the suicides of Delaye and Fay White. Eventually, she breaks up with Lloyd and leaves New York for post-War France.

elicited a mixed critical response. It was seen to be either a realistic portrayal of New York or anti-American in its sentiment. The portrayal of the city was agreed to be convincing, but the structure of the novel was generally faulted for falling short of being a unified whole. The review in (TLS) (26 August 1926) stated of the characters, ‘As isolated types they are successful, but in a connected narrative there is no cohesion in their relationships, and the general impression attained is that the fabric of the book has been hurriedly woven in order to embed in the story some clever character sketches.’ The same review also faulted the construction of the protagonist, Mayne, arguing that the attractiveness of her personality ‘is lost sight of in her immense egotism.’ As with her previous novels, Mander’s financial reward for the book was insignificant and she continued to have to depend on journalism as her primary source of income.

The pressure of Mander’s financial circumstances and work demands continued to affect her health. During the writing of her next novel, she was suffering badly from boils. (1928) was primarily motivated by the desire to complete her contract with her publisher, Hutchinsons. The situation bore similarities to that surrounding the writing of her second and third novels, for was also the product of a deliberate attempt to write a popular novel. Mander hoped that the higher sales of a more populist novel might grant her some breathing space from journalism in order that she might achieve a more literary standard with her next work. However, failed to catch the public imagination. Mander was forced to abandon the writing of novels for the time, and although she later resumed her writing it was to be her last published novel.

The plot of is set in 1926, and largely centres on the relationships between the inhabitants of several neighbouring houses in Chelsea. The houses are owned by one of their inhabitants, John Craik, a wealthy businessman who sustained shell shock in World War One and is now subject to paranoia. He has been friends since childhood with publisher Paul Daley, who also lives there and is instrumental in releasing Craik from the clutches of his grasping mother and sister and sending him on a holiday to South America. Adjacent to Daley lives Mirabel Heath, a book illustrator who is recovering from a disastrous marriage, but they have only met once and he is apparently uninterested in women. Daley befriends Julius Vaughan, the young author of a book of fantastical tales entitled , and Heath is hired as its illustrator. She and Vaughan are introduced and become friends, with Vaughan proving to be both charismatic and egotistical. Daley and Heath eventually meet through the efforts of Vaughan and her admirer, Anthony Field, who is a successful poster artist and landscape painter. The four become friends, playing bridge together weekly and spending time at Heath’s summer retreat. Craik returns and becomes increasingly jealous of Daley’s friendship with Heath, which has become a secret engagement. Craik ultimately tries to kill Heath, but shoots Vaughan instead before killing himself. The novel concludes with the recovery of Vaughan and the marriage of Daley and Heath.

Following the limited success of , Mander continued to write for New Zealand newspapers and read manuscripts for a living. She also became the English editor of Harrison of Paris, a private printing press founded by two of her friends from New York, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Westcott, and financed by wealthy American Barbara Harrison. Harrison of Paris specialised in producing high-quality limited editions, focusing on typography, paper and illustrations. Mander’s role was to see their publications through the press. One of her particular projects was the reproduction of the original 1692 English translation of Aesop’s , for which she studied the original extensively in the British Museum and saw the project through to publication.

By 1931, Mander was struggling with living in London as she had done earlier with New York. Mentally she was oppressed by the noise of the city, her financial stresses and the difficulty of publishing her novels. She was also disillusioned by the inherent advantages enjoyed by younger British writers that she felt she lacked with her colonial background. Money from her father allowed her to cease manuscript reading for almost a year and she left London for Shropshire during the summer, spending the time writing. The break benefited her health and she completed two books. By the end of 1931, however, she had run out of money and had to return to manuscript reading. Nothing came of her latest creative work, however, and Mander became increasingly homesick so in September she sailed for New Zealand. While she was concerned about whether she would experience intellectual society in New Zealand, especially in comparison to London, she looked forward to living in Auckland with the support of her family and her father’s promise to release her from financial worries so that she could write again.

These hopes were not to come to fruition. While en route to New Zealand, Mander’s mother died after a long illness. On her arrival, Mander consequently became her elderly father’s caregiver, partly out of obligation to her siblings who had performed the role during her absence, but she was unhappy at the prospect. Mander also discovered that her father was not as wealthy as she had been led to believe, and the financial freedom she had been promised was not in fact forthcoming. He had invested in property, and the Depression had severely diminished rental incomes. She had been met with some acclaim by the New Zealand media on her return, being recognised as an established writer, and it was again to journalism that she turned in her need to earn money. She became acquainted with Jock Gillespie, editor of the (Auckland), who offered her some freelance work. In March 1933, Mander also began giving radio talks on a range of topics related to her overseas experiences. In a similar vein, she entered the guest speaker circuit and spoke to women’s groups. These measures ensured she maintained a relatively high public profile, but they were a distraction from her desire to write another novel.

Mander was also distracted by her family obligations. Her father was demanding, and she also spent some time caring for her sister-in-law. Furthermore, when they could no longer afford it, Mander had to take the place of her father’s housekeeper. A further frustration came when, at the age of eighty-four, Frank Mander decided to move house. The new property was discovered to require a large amount of refurbishment, further tightening the purse strings. Mander’s sister, Carrie, had been under psychiatric care but the need to economise meant that she came to live in the new house as well. Her father placated Mander with the promise of money from an investment that would fall due in the following year, but for the time being she was unable to write. Out of the little money she did earn, Mander sent what she could to Holcroft and his wife. They had maintained their correspondence, and Mander was keen to see that he pursue his writing career despite the intense pressures that the Depression placed upon them.

The following year, Mander’s father decided to take her on an extensive holiday around the South Island. While in Christchurch she visited John Schroder, the editor of . He commissioned some articles from Mander, and she gained further work on her return to Auckland. Gillespie provided Mander with a regular book page in (Auckland), paying two guineas per article. The money was welcome and she was able to read according to her own desires, but the task of reading up to twenty novels each month proved another barrier to Mander’s own fiction. Her anxiousness was exacerbated by the accomplishment of many of the contemporary English novels she was reviewing. Her anger mounted against her father for what she saw to be his miserliness, and she secured two hours for writing each morning after issuing him with an ultimatum. At this time she was working on a novel she had begun while in England, set on the Welsh border in 1932, but nothing more is known of it.

Since her return to New Zealand, Mander had been sent a large number of manuscripts from aspiring writers desirous of her advice on their prospects for overseas success. She expressed her disappointment with the majority of the work she had received through an extensive series of articles in on New Zealand novelists, novels and short stories. In her November 1934 series, ‘,’ she castigated the majority of aspiring writers for belonging to the ‘New Stupid,’ a ‘half-baked, wrongly educated, pretentious, cinema-polluted mongrel lot.’ She criticised their belief that writing was a way to earn money and the consequent commodification of fiction. Mander identified certain recurrent faults in New Zealand writing of the time:

[I]ncongruous dialogue; a poor sense for character; a poor sense for significant incident, or no ability to make small incident significant; sentimentality; a tendency to moralise, and a preoccupation with ‘right and wrong’; agitation about accuracy, the absolute truth; no distinction for style. [10 November, 17]

Mander also condemned the philistinism of the popular reaction to art, arguing that judgments about the morality of art in New Zealand tended to be made by those without any understanding of art. For the serious writer, she advocated years of experimentation and the need to develop a love for language and its precise use. Author Ngaio Marsh responded with gratitude in (22 December 1934), likening Mander to a midwife buffeting the unbreathing child of New Zealand literature in the hope of bringing it to life.

In a further series of articles for in December 1934, Mander considered the likely opportunities for New Zealand writers and the barriers against their success. She thought that New Zealand provided a suitable environment, and its writers possessed the skills necessary, for writing short stories, action novels, family novels of colonial settings, ‘novels of the soil’ and simple love stories. However, she did not think that New Zealand society had developed ‘that mysterious something in a race that stimulates the higher type of writer.’ [1 December, 17] She was particularly critical of New Zealand society and its disregard for its artists, arguing that it had betrayed the intellectual heritage of the original settlers with its persistent desire for conformity. She asked rhetorically what roused enthusiasm in New Zealand and sarcastically concluded that ‘the answer seems to be that for women it is cake-making, and for men chest development.’ [15 December, 17] Such comments reflected her own frustrating circumstances, where the demands of her work left Mander exhausted by the end of 1934. She was granted a brief respite with a holiday in the Bay of Islands over the summer before returning to her domestic obligations.

Mander’s involvement in the New Zealand literary community extended to friendships with other writers in Auckland. In particular, she became friends with Frank Sargeson and he worked in the Mander garden to supplement his income. Mander was enlisted in 1935 to help with the organisation of the New Zealand Authors’ Week, an event to be held in April of the following year. She was responsible for compiling the biographies and bibliographies of New Zealand authors for a book to celebrate the week, (1936), edited by Johannes Carl Andersen. During the winter, Mander became troubled by neuritis in her right arm, a condition that left her unable to type. After rest proved unsuccessful in restoring her health, she underwent thrice-weekly electrical treatment for several months.

The Authors’ Week was a public success, and during it Mander gave an extensive talk on post-World War I New Zealand authors. She finished the week exhausted by the frantic reading she had done in preparation for her talk. Meanwhile, her domestic situation had become worse, with her sister’s mental health deteriorating and her father also falling ill. Mander’s own health began to deteriorate under the strain, with neuritis continuing to trouble her. The added complication of an eye problem meant that she could not read for a time. Mander nevertheless continued to review books for , as well as giving a series of ten radio talks on ‘Women Through the Ages.’ Mander resigned from at the end of 1936 and was able to recuperate to some extent during the summer. Later in 1937, she briefly returned to writing for . In the same year she was offered a job by the New Zealand Broadcasting Service to help run a women’s programme, but her domestic demands meant that she had reluctantly to decline.

From the beginning of 1938 until the end of 1939, Mander wrote a monthly book page for (Wellington). Most significantly for her own literary aspirations, however, was the 1938 reprinting in London and New Zealand of . This received a high level of publicity in the New Zealand media, with lengthy reviews in newspapers by Monte Holcroft, Frank Sargeson and C. R. Allen. The book was recast as something of a landmark of New Zealand writing, and thus began to establish its enduring reputation. However, sales were affected by the New Zealand publisher’s decision to delay the release of the book until after their sale, with the consequence that it was still unavailable at the time the reviews appeared. During this period Mander also began memoirs of her time in London and New York, but did not proceed beyond an abortive beginning.

Mander continued to care for her father, and in 1941 she again became nurse for her sick sister-in-law. This was a commitment that prevented her from working for most of the year. At the end of 1941, her sister-in-law died and her brother, Bert, suffered a breakdown. Mander consequently cared for him as well, and by the time he had recovered she was ill herself. She had contracted conjunctivitis which not respond to treatment, and was rendered unable to read or write for eight months. In 1942, her father suffered a stroke that left him bedridden and from that point his health deteriorated until he died on 27 August of that year. After the funeral, Mander collapsed from emotional exhaustion.

The following year, Mander moved to a small apartment of her own in Auckland where she lived for three years. While she enjoyed the sense of liberation without her sick father to care for, her poor eyesight limited the amount of newspaper work she could do. At the same time she felt her creative impulses overwhelmed by the magnitude of world events as World War II unfolded. As her health deteriorated, she decided to move to Whangarei to be near her younger siblings. However, before the move occurred she suffered a stroke that left her in care for three months. Once in Whangarei, she suffered another stroke that again left her bedridden. Mander never fully recovered her health and she died in Whangarei on 20 December 1949 aged seventy-two.

Jane Mander’s posthumous critical reputation has been characterised by ambivalence. Interest has largely focused, as in her lifetime, on , which has been reprinted several times. It has become established as a significant early text of New Zealand realism, with its depiction of the landscape and the relationship between place and characters. Recently, this view has been re-examined from a number of perspectives and some critics now question the extent and validity of Mander’s portrayal of the landscape. More generally, feminist critics have emphasised Mander’s depiction of her central female characters and their opposition to the constraints of New Zealand society, but they have also criticised her negative portrayal of some female characters, particularly Marion Adern in . Mander was also at the heart of controversy in the 1990s with accusations that (1993), a movie directed by New Zealander Jane Campion, borrowed from without acknowledgement. The ongoing debate over Mander’s status was most recently highlighted by the publication of a 1998 biography. The response was divided between those who see her as a pioneer of New Zealand literature who struggled against the odds and those who believe that she was uncommitted to New Zealand and that her writing became increasingly anachronistic.

Ellen Margaret (Nelle) Scanlan, 1882–1968 Kirstine Moffat

Nelle Scanlan was the most popular New Zealand novelist of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly important for her pivotal role in creating a New Zealand market and readership for New Zealand fiction. Her Pencarrow novels were the first bestsellers written by a New Zealander, with a New Zealand setting, and appealing to the local market. However, the success of these, and Scanlan’s other novels, is also an indication of their limitations. Scanlan’s fiction appealed to readers precisely because it held up a comfortable picture of New Zealand as a prosperous, thriving nation of hard working individuals with close ties to their British roots. Her novels speak of the desirability of the traditional ideals of family loyalty, individual responsibility and hard work and are grounded in a conservative political outlook distinguished by laissez faire non-interventionism and free trade. These were the values of her middle class, pakeha readership and inevitably her fiction had wide popular appeal. Within the confines of her chosen genres, the family saga and romance, Scanlan was capable of insight into the tensions and triumphs of human relationships. However, her recurring character types — the serene wife and mother, the demanding husband, the rebellious adolescent and the patient lover — at times lack individuality and her plots are constrained by their moral framework and romantic formula. Only in does Scanlan depart from her successful pattern in a bleak expose of the predicament of the New Zealand artist abroad. This is the most autobiographical of Scanlan’s novels and reflects her independent outlook and adventurous spirit. Scanlan’s life as a journalist and writer has all the hallmarks of a feminist crusader, but, in keeping with her conservative politics, she vociferously rejected the feminist label and in her fiction lauded the influence of strong, domestic women.

Ellen Margaret Scanlan, always known as Nelle, was born in Picton on 15 January 1882. She came from Irish Catholic heritage. Her father, Michael Scanlan, was born in Country Kerry, Ireland. He had an adventurous disposition and had travelled to the Australian goldfields before settling in New Zealand, where he worked as a police sergeant. His wife, Ellen Kiely, was 20 years his junior and came from a farming and seafaring County Cork family. Nelle Scanlan had an older sister, Mary, and an older brother, Dan.

Scanlan had an awareness and appreciation of language from a young age. When she was four she was attracted by the word ‘Pickwick’ when her father read aloud Charles Dickens’s . The rhythms of poetry also appealed, another early memory being waking to hear the line ‘Quoth the Raven never more’.

When Scanlan was 5 the family moved to Blenheim, where she attended the Convent School. Her father’s friendship with the poet Thomas Bracken reinforced her early love of literature. Bracken would recite ‘Not Understood’ and the ‘Legend of the Taramakau’ for the family and would always give Nelle a special rendition of ‘Chinese Johnny’ in pidgin English. Another important family connection was with gregarious Wellington businessman Henry Blundell, who later became the model for Miles Pencarrow in the Pencarrow tetralogy.

Michael Scanlan died when Nelle was a child and in the late 1890s the family moved to Palmerston North. Nelle taught herself shorthand and typing and acquired her first job as a typist in an office. However, she wanted a more independent career and established her own secretarial business doing confidential work for lawyers and bankers. She rented an office in the Copeland Building and later drew on her memories of the inventor Copeland brothers, James and Henry, when she wrote .

Scanlan’s first literary experiments as a young woman came in the form of poems. A submission to the resulted in a cutting comment in the Red Page: ‘N. S.: As your poem was neatly type-written we restrain our wrath’ (, 121). A second venture proved equally humiliating when her poem was rejected by the women’s magazine . Abandoning poetry, Scanlan turned to fiction and journalism and had the occasional article and short story published in the .

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914 Scanlan volunteered to go to the North Island command center at the Awapuni Racecourse where she was responsible for getting the soldiers’ papers in order. The following year she joined the staff of the , working first as a reporter and then the sub-editor. The war years were a painful time for the Scanlan family, Nelle’s brother Dan bring killed in action in France.

Scanlan continued to pursue her journalistic career after the war. In 1921 she travelled to Washington to report on the Arms Limitation Conference. As the only woman at the Conference and one of only three New Zealanders, she had an exotic appeal for Washington political society. After speaking at a conference for delegates and their wives at the Raleigh Hotel she acquired the status of an unofficial roving ambassador for her homeland, speaking at functions from Los Angeles to Boston.

Throughout her time in America Scanlan wrote articles on social events and local personalities for the and the newly established Women’s News Service. In 1923 she published her first book, a collection of essays about female American political personalities, including Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Mrs Woodrow Wilson and Florence Kate Harding. was published anonymously and is a chatty, anecdotal and at times sarcastic commentary on Washington politics.

Scanlan moved to England in 1923. She continued to work as a freelance journalist, specialising in writing articles about famous people (particularly royalty), social occasions and places of historic note. In 1927 she returned to New Zealand to report on the royal tour of the Duke and Duchess of York. Travelling back to England via Singapore, she had a journalistic triumph when she obtained permission from the recently appointed Admiral Mackworth to tour the Singapore Naval Base.

In 1930, coming home angry from a party, Scanlan sat on the edge of her bed and wrote the first few pages of a novel. This became The Top Step, first published in 1931. The novel focuses on the relationships between the members of an extended family, a narrative set-up that became Scanlan’s trademark, and establishes several character types that Scanlan was to return to in subsequent fiction. At the centre of the novel is the soothing presence of Margaret Crest, patient wife, wise mother and domestic buffer between her querulous husband and his rebellious stepdaughter. Jonson Crest and Nuala must learn the lesson Margaret has already mastered, that mutual understanding and compromise are the necessary foundations of productive relationships.

The Top Step was well received in both Britain and New Zealand, the praising the novel for its ‘humour, sincerity and understanding’ and its ‘studied avoidance of cheap sensationalism’ (4 July 1931). Scanlan was invited to join the international writers’ association P.E.N. after its publication, coming into contact with contemporary authors such as John Galsworthy and H. G. Wells.

Scanlan’s second novel, Primrose Hill (1931), quickly followed. Once again the focus is on the pathos and humour of human interaction, this time in a London boarding house. The main narrative establishes the moral romantic formula that became the staple of much of her fiction, Clare Patterson and Erick Hogue unable to indulge their love until the death of his wife. Scanlan also comments on the artistic lifestyle. Erick, who has had to fight for success as a writer, is productive, while Clare’s ambitions as a pianist are never realised because she ‘suffered from the supreme artistic handicap of having just enough money to live on’ (40).

From the outset of her career as a novelist Scanlan was open about her desire to write what people wanted to read. When her publisher, Robert Hale, suggested to her in 1932 that she should write about New Zealand, she told him that novels with a New Zealand setting were ‘never popular out there…There have been novels about New Zealand, some of them quite good, but they’ve never had much in the way of sales. Something romantic and dramatic can happen in Piccadilly Circus but not on Lambton Quay’ (Road to Pencarrow, 181). He persuaded her to reconsider and she began writing an historical novel set in Wellington.

Pencarrow (1932) focuses on the fortunes and interweaving relationships of the Pencarrow family, who are held together by the gracious matriarch Bessie (based on Scanlan’s mother). The original Pencarrows immigrate to New Zealand in the 1860s in search of ‘better things, wider opportunities’ (7). Their ambition is fulfilled and they establish two prosperous farms in the Hutt Valley and the Wairarapa. Their children continue this tradition of hard work breeding success. Michael stays on the land, while the flamboyant Miles (based on the Scanlan family friend Henry Blundell) becomes a successful lawyer in Wellington. The novel was an immediate success in both New Zealand and Britain, running to five editions in the first year of its publication. New Zealand reviews speak of the way in which the novel struck a chord of recognition with readers, presenting them with a New Zealand they felt comfortable with and proud of: ‘Their [the Pencarrows’] successes and failures, loves, tragedies, and achievements might equally apply to numerous pioneer families… [who] have contributed to the faithful building of this young Dominion along traditional British lines’ (, 2 July 1932).

When Scanlan returned to New Zealand in 1933 she was awarded the Freedom of Blenheim and was active in establishing a New Zealand branch of P.E.N. and a New Zealand Women Writers’ and Artists’ Society. Her main reason for travelling to New Zealand was to do research for the sequel to Pencarrow, (1933). Set in the early decades of the twentieth century, this focuses on the third generation of Pencarrows. The importance of the work ethic remains a constant, but Scanlan also emphasises the need for work to be congenial. Inter-generational conflict dominates the novel as Miles struggles to accept that his children have dreams of their own, Kelly longing not for the law but the land, Pat determined to leave the land and follow the lure of the sea and Mary rejecting plans for a brilliant marriage to become a nun. The familiar Scanlan mixture of family dramas, the trials of love and the rewards of hard work and moral conduct once again met with favourable reviews and healthy sales.

An insight into the type of fiction Scanlan enjoyed reading and aimed to write is found in her 1933 essay on ‘’. In this she deplores the prevalence of thrillers, war books and novels ‘sated with indecencies and…sex’ and calls for more books to be published that are ‘sane, sound, beautiful, vivid and above all, sincere’ (, February 1933).

On her return to London in late 1933 Scanlan established a routine that she followed in subsequent years. She led a quiet life over autumn and winter writing her next novel, submitted the manuscript to her publisher in early spring, travelled overseas (to European destinations such as Norway, Holland, Spain and Russia) and returned to London at the end of the summer.

The first novel to be written after her return was the third Pencarrow saga, (1934). This is set in the 1930s, the present for Scanlan’s original audience. The Pencarrows, like Scanlan’s readers, are enduring a period of struggle as wool prices slump during the Depression. However, as the country emerges from the Depression the family experiences a renewed stability and prosperity. Scanlan’s recipe of triumph over adversity through family support and hard work once again proved popular.

Scanlan’s next novel has autobiographical resonances and is by far the most bleak and realistic of her fictional oeuvre. (1935) traces the growth of Mary Merridge from her Wellington childhood to her adult adventures in America and England. The novel is noteworthy for the way in which it punctures the glamour of overseas travel and the optimism of artistic ambition. Life for New Zealanders abroad is shown to be a succession of fleeting successes, petty subterfuges and financial perils. Even the standard love plot offers pain rather than comfort. Refusing to grant readers the relief of a happy ending, Scanlan has Mary’s lover Harley Ross die of typhoid during their Spanish honeymoon. Readers and reviewers reacted adversely to this break from the Scanlan pattern, the declaring that ‘for the ending Miss Scanlan gives to her romance she deserves to be shot at dawn’ (13 July 1935).

Perhaps predictably, Scanlan retreated from the realism of Ambition’s Harvest into the cosy comfort of the English countryside in her next offering, (1936), which delighted reviewers with its ‘flavour of the old bouquet’ (, 8 November 1936). This romance between a middle aged man and an eighteen-year-old girl retains a jarring note, however, in the person of Zoe Cotter. After a lifetime of devotion to her brother’s comfort, she is displaced when he marries and reflects bitterly on male selfishness. While Scanlan’s novels tend to deify the domestic wife and mother, there are also hints at a concern for the vulnerability of single women.

Scanlan’s next four novels all had New Zealand settings and a strong message about the importance of the work ethic. (1937) draws on her memories of the Copeland brothers from Palmerston North. The Marion brothers in the novel are indoctrinated by their uncle into his creed that ‘life is not work; one must have leisure for living’ (10). This is challenged by the difficulties they confront in their own lives and the example of florist Nancy Girling and builder Charlie Buckle who advocate discipline, work and ‘limited leisure’ that is earned (111). Likewise, Simon Grimstone in (1938) needs to learn to follow the tenacious, independent example of his friend Phil Henn when the two emigrate to New Zealand. In 1939 Scanlan satisfied demands for another Pencarrow novel with . The typical blend of family struggles and achievements through effort are, on this occasion, used to attack Labour policies, which are seen as a threat to the Pencarrows’ ethic of individual initiative. The financial and romantic rewards of hard work are reinforced yet again in (1944), set on a struggling farm near Blenheim.

Scanlan was in New Zealand on one of her regular five yearly visits at the outbreak of World War II. During the next few years she gave a series of radio broadcasts entitled ‘Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax’ which provided descriptions of the locations of the war arena, most of which Scanlan had visited.

Returning to England on board the Waiwera in 1944, Scanlan reestablished her writing regime. During her enforced stay in New Zealand she had begun another novel set in London between the war years. She described (1947) as a ‘means of escape from the terrifying present’ (Road to Pencarrow, 185). In contrast to the New Zealand novels of the preceding decade, this acknowledges the need for the pleasures of culture as a leaven for the dull realities of work and routine. The title character is a dilettante who has the financial luxury to dabble in the arts. There is none of the usual Scanlan condemnation for this lack of backbone. Kit is rewarded with a happy marriage, continues to indulge himself and forces his staid cousin Mark to ‘wonder if it were essential that every aspect of life should be constrained to some utilitarian purpose’ (213).

A similar insistence on the need for spontaneity and personal pleasure are hallmarks of (1948). Returning to Scanlan’s favoured farming setting just north of Wellington, the novel is a typical family saga. The patriarch, Roger Harty, has much in common with Scanlan’s father, an Irish rover, an adventurer and a dreamer. His excesses are restrained by his wife Katty (another Scanlan matriarch), but the Harty home is a gregarious, fun-loving, welcoming environment in which personal happiness is seen as a right. In contrast is the regimented household of the puritanical Jessie Swift, which stands as a warning against an obsessive devotion to duty and work.

In 1948 Scanlan returned to live permanently in New Zealand, settling in St Jude’s Cottage at Paraparaumu beach. She continued to write, publishing two more novels with New Zealand settings. (1950) draws on her memories of her Blenheim childhood, particularly the idiosyncrasies of retired army officers from India. Her final novel, (1952), is set on the Kapiti Coast and revisits the themes and personality types of her first novel. Once again a young, sulky, rebellious daughter has to come to terms with a parent’s remarriage, this time a beloved father.

The Pencarrow tetralogy was successfully reissued in 1958. The total New Zealand sales of both issues of the series exceeded 80,000, a record for fiction written by a New Zealander and set in New Zealand (Mulgan, 96). In 1963 Scanlan published an anecdotal autobiography, Road to Pencarrow, which reuses much of the material in Ambition’s Harvest, and in 1965 she received an MBE for services to journalism and literature. She died in Calvary Hospital in Wellington after a severe heart attack on 5 October 1968.

Nelle Scanlan’s ambition was to write novels that people would want to read and she was successful in realising this ambition. Once she had established a successful recipe of family dynamics, moral conduct and romantic dilemmas she stuck to the formula. She had the ability to capture and hold the attention of readers through her uncomplicated narrative action, eye for humour and pathos, and believable, if somewhat formulaic, characters. The continued presence of her fiction on the shelves of public libraries is testimony to the ongoing appeal of her readable prose and conservative ethics. While her fiction is limited by its reliance on romance conventions and its evocation of an insular, middle class, pakeha world, Scanlan is a significant figure in the New Zealand literary canon because of her influence on the kind of fiction that was read by New Zealanders. With her beloved Pencarrow series she revolutionised New Zealand reading tastes, creating an appetite for New Zealand fiction that paved the way for subsequent local authors. Such a warm-hearted embracing of New Zealand material was perhaps only possible with fiction that did not seek to critique or change the national character, but rather celebrated New Zealand as a nation with a proud pioneering past and a secure industrious future.

Katherine Mansfield, 1888-1923 Joanna Woods

Katherine Mansfield is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated authors and enjoys a widespread international following. With her contemporaries, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, she forms part of the literary avant-garde whose innovations in the second and third decades of the twentieth century signalled the emergence of modernism. Her reputation rests on a collection of eighty-eight deceptively simple short stories, in which she pioneered many new literary techniques and exerted an important influence on the evolution of the short story in English.

In her writing Mansfield breaks away from the conventions of nineteenth-century fiction by dispensing with the independent voice of the narrator and by reducing plot to a minimum. Her focus is on the inner world rather than on external action, and much of the narration is located within the minds of her characters. Mansfield’s place in Western literature has been assured by her technical achievements, but she owes her lasting popularity with her readers to the elegance and wit of her writing. Her stories are a brilliant evocation of a bygone, Edwardian world, in which childhood memories, loneliness, and the complexity of human relationships are recurring themes. Her prose is noted for its economy and compression, and she presents her artistic vision through a series of meticulously crafted impressions, enlivened by often-mischievous imagery. Mansfield left New Zealand in 1908, aged nineteen, and spent most of her adult life in England and France, but her New Zealand heritage played a crucial role in her creative development and inspired many of her finest stories.

Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, on 14 October 1888. She was the third child of Harold and Annie Beauchamp and was christened Kathleen. Her second name was Mansfield, the maiden name of her maternal grandmother, which she later adopted to form the pseudonym ‘Katherine Mansfield.’ The family origins of her parents were predominantly British—although there was some distant Huguenot blood in Harold’s ancestry—and both of them were born in Australia. Harold first came to New Zealand at the age of two, when his father decided to abandon his unsuccessful career as a ‘general merchant’ in the Australian gold fields in favour of an equally restless life in New Zealand. In 1876, at the age of eighteen, Harold started work as a clerk with an importing firm in Wellington. Unlike his father, however, he had the ability and energy to establish himself in business and by the time Kathleen was born, he was already prosperous. He later went on to become the Chairman of the Board of the Bank of New Zealand and to play a prominent role in the commercial life of Wellington. He was knighted in 1923 for his financial services to New Zealand.

Annie Beauchamp was born Annie Burnell Dyer. Her mother’s family, the Mansfields, had been Sydney publicans and her father, Joseph Dyer, worked in insurance. After Annie’s birth in 1864, her parents moved to New Zealand where her father set up the Wellington branch of an Australian insurance company. Annie first met Harold when she was thirteen and in 1884, after a lengthy courtship, they married. Contemporary photographs show Annie as an attractive and elegant woman, but she suffered from frequent ill health and had little of her husband’s vitality.

Mansfield frequently portrays her parents in her writing. In two of her best-known New Zealand stories, ‘’ (1918) and ‘’ (1922), Harold appears in the guise of the self-important Stanley Burnell, while Annie, as Linda Burnell, is depicted as an indifferent and distant mother. In ‘’ (1922), Mansfield’s portrait of her mother as Mrs Sheridan is rather more sympathetic, but it still emphasises the gulf that she felt existed between her and the rest of her family. The only member of the Beauchamp household who seems to have understood her complex personality and to have responded to her demands for love, was her grandmother, Margaret Mansfield Dyer. This may well be one of the reasons why Kathleen later chose to write under her grandmother’s name.

Kathleen’s conviction, from early childhood, that she was an outsider in her own family initially stemmed from her position as the third of four daughters of parents who longed for a son. When her only brother, Leslie, was finally born in 1894, the family fell into two groupings. Kathleen’s two elder sisters, Vera and Charlotte, who were born in 1885 and 1887 respectively, formed a natural partnership at the top of the family. A fourth daughter, Gwendoline, died in 1891 aged three months, while Jeanne (who was four years younger than Kathleen), and Leslie were always affectionately regarded as ‘the babies’. Consequently, Kathleen found herself isolated in the middle of the family with no particular ally of her own

Kathleen’s sense of alienation, however, was not simply due to her lack of a special position in the family hierarchy. It was also a question of personality. Highly intelligent and with precocious powers of observation, Kathleen was quick to note that she did not have exclusive rights to the affections of her parents. She longed to occupy centre stage and in her efforts to assert herself, she became moody and difficult. Her acute sensitivity and her desire to excel — the very qualities that contributed so much to her later success as a writer — further exacerbated her feelings that she was a misfit.

Despite her psychological isolation, Kathleen had a carefree and privileged childhood. Harold’s growing prosperity ensured that his five children enjoyed the best that money could buy. When Kathleen was four and a half, her parents moved from their relatively modest house at 11 Tinakori Road, in which Kathleen had been born, to a rambling country establishment a few kilometres outside the city. The house, which was in the suburb of Karori, had a large garden with an orchard and enough land to justify keeping cows, pigs chickens and horses. Kathleen revelled in these new surroundings and they later became the setting for ‘Prelude’.

Kathleen’s formal education began in 1895 when she attended the Karori village school. Her love of writing was soon in evidence, and in 1897 she won the school prize for English composition with a piece entitled ‘’. She also read avidly and a contemporary photograph shows her as a plump and solemn child in unbecoming, steel-rimmed spectacles. In mid-1898 Kathleen was enrolled at the more sophisticated Wellington Girls’ High School. A few months later the Beauchamps left Karori and returned to Wellington. Harold had just been appointed by the New Zealand Premier, Richard Seddon, as one of the directors of the Bank of New Zealand and, in keeping with his new status, he moved his family to an impressive mansion at 75 Tinakori Road, not far from their earlier home.

At her new school Kathleen’s academic abilities became apparent at an early stage. She won prizes for English, Arithmetic, and French and two pieces by her, signed ‘Kathleen Beauchamp’, appeared in the school magazine. In June 1900, however, Harold and Annie decided to move their three elder daughters to an exclusive private school called Miss Swainson’s. For Kathleen, this change of schooling coincided with the onset of adolescence. As she matured, both physically and mentally, she lost her childhood plumpness and embarked on her lifelong habit of recording her innermost feelings in a series of notebooks. Her interest in writing continued and she wrote poetry as well as founding a school magazine. Despite her intellectual talents, however, Kathleen had few close friends. Both at home and at school, she continued to feel like an outsider and her emotions were frequently in a state of turmoil.

In 1902 Kathleen found a focus for her adolescent yearnings. She fell in love with a young musician named Arnold Trowell, who was a brilliant cellist. The romance was largely in her own mind, but it encouraged her already strong interest in music and led her to believe, for the next six years, that music was her true vocation. Harold, meanwhile, had decided that his three elder daughters would benefit from further education in London, and on 29 January 1903 all seven members of the Beauchamp family, accompanied by Annie’s brother and sister, Sydney and Belle Dyer, set sail for England on a small steamship called the Niwaru. After visiting family and friends, Harold, Annie, and the two younger children returned to New Zealand, but for the next three years Kathleen and her two elder sisters remained in London as pupils at a select school for girls called Queen’s College, Harley Street.

The wide-ranging education that Kathleen received at Queen’s played a vital role in her intellectual development. She read voraciously, and the list of authors that she proposes to young New Zealanders on her return to Wellington gives a good indication of the breadth of her interests. Among those she recommends are: William Morris, Catule Mendès, George Meredith, Maurice Maeterlinck, John Ruskin, Rodenbach, Le Gallienne, Arthur Symons, Gabriele D’Annunzio, George Bernard Shaw, Granville Barker, Sebastian Melmouth, Walt Whitman, Leo Tolstoy, Edward Carpenter, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Brontës.

With her precocious mind and her literary abilities, Kathleen soon attracted the attention of the German master, Walter Rippmann. Rippman took a keen interest in the Queen’s College Magazine, to which Kathleen contributed, and he encouraged her to expand her literary horizons by reading the works of modern authors with ‘decadent’ and symbolist overtones. Foremost among these was Oscar Wilde, whose work began to exert a strong influence on her outlook. Throughout her time at Queen’s, however, Kathleen’s chief interest was music and while she continued to write poems and sentimental stories about children in her notebook, her ambition was to become a professional cellist.

At Queen’s Kathleen also formed some close friendships with her fellow pupils and inspired the lifelong devotion of a lonely girl named Ida Constance Baker, who later took on the thankless task of being Mansfield’s domestic helper. Kathleen still believed that she was in love with Arnold Trowell (who was always known as Tom), and she had a schoolgirl passion for Rippmann, but there is also evidence that under the sway of Wilde, she began to develop an interest in her own sex. In April 1906, when Harold and Annie arrived in London to bring their daughters home, they found Kathleen difficult to manage. Thanks largely to Rippmann, she had tasted an intellectual freedom that was quite beyond the comprehension of her more conventional family. She longed to stay in London to pursue her musical career, but her father refused his permission, and so she decided to devote herself to writing. On the return voyage to Wellington, she documented her constant clashes with her parents in her notebook, in which she also refers, in lurid, Wildean language, to some of her sexual encounters aboard ship.

On 6 December 1906, after six weeks at sea, the Beauchamps arrived back in Wellington. By January they had moved to another large house at 47 Fitzherbert Terrace, in which Annie entertained regularly. In the gossip columns of the local papers, the musical accomplishments of the three Misses Beauchamp are admiringly reported and throughout the next eighteen months, Kathleen’s presence at social occasions is regularly recorded in the Wellington press. But although she went through the motions of participating in local society, her notebook entries at this time reveal her inner frustration. After three years in the stimulating, intellectual atmosphere of London, she felt stifled by family life and found few people in Wellington who shared her literary interests. She was determined to become a writer, and she spent many hours in her room writing in her notebook and working on a semi-autobiographical novel—which she never finished—called . She continued to read widely, availing herself of the reading rights which Harold had acquired for her at Wellington’s General Assembly Library.

At this stage Kathleen was still experimenting with a variety of literary genres. She planned a book of child stories with a woman friend nine years her senior named Edith Bendall, but their friendship developed into a love affair and the projected book was never completed. The affair with ‘Edie’ was followed by a similar relationship with an earlier schoolmate at Miss Swainson’s, the beautiful Maori heiress Maata Mahupuku. Kathleen’s notebooks also record flirtations with men and in a letter to an English cousin, she claims to have received five proposals of marriage.

Throughout this turbulent period in her life, however, writing was always foremost in her mind. In October 1907 three descriptive pieces by her, entitled ‘’, appeared in a Melbourne journal called the . The ‘Vignettes’, whose overblown style was strongly influenced by Wilde, were Kathleen’s first adult publications. This was also the first occasion on which she used the pseudonym ‘K. Mansfield’. In November and December 1907 the Native Companion published further examples of her work, including a short story called ‘’. Although the writing is immature, ‘’ already displays many of the key elements of Mansfield’s later work. The plot is slight—an encounter between a young couple in which they toy with the idea of marriage—and the interest is focused on the girl’s emotions. There is little external action and the characterisation is achieved through the presentation of carefully selected detail and dialogue. The climax of the story comes at the deciding moment when the heroine realises that her admirer has thrown away her gift of violets.

Part of the success of these early literary endeavours was due to the support of Harold. When he learned that the editor of the doubted the authenticity of the ‘Vignettes’, he wrote to him, without Kathleen’s knowledge, confirming that she was their author and expressing his belief in her ability to write. Harold also found an imaginative solution to Kathleen’s boredom with conventional social life by organising for her to take a month-long camping trip in the North Island of New Zealand. This holiday gave Kathleen a vivid experience of New Zealand’s natural beauty, which she not only cherished for the rest of her life, but also drew on for literary material. Her memories of the summer cottage rented by Harold at Day’s Bay were an even greater source of literary inspiration. Lying in unspoilt native bush on the east side of Wellington Harbour, this cottage forms the background to her story ‘’.

During 1908 some minor pieces by Kathleen appeared in New Zealand publications, but she continued to rebel against life in Wellington and eventually persuaded her parents to allow her to move to London to pursue a literary career. On 6 July 1908, aged 19, she set sail alone for England and never returned to New Zealand. During her first months in London, Kathleen was unhappy and short of money. She had no literary contacts, or knowledge of the literary world, and her only income was an annual allowance of £100 from her father. She lived in a room in a hostel for music students in Paddington and spent her days trying to write. According to her biographer, Antony Alpers, her story ‘’ dates from this time. The story, which was first published in 1924, describes a day in the life of a poor shop girl who imagines a fairy tale romance with a handsome, male customer. The action moves between the past, the present, and an imaginary future and is an early example of Mansfield’s sophisticated management of different time levels.

Within a few weeks of her arrival, Kathleen was driven by loneliness and homesickness to seek out the Trowell family, now resident in London. The affections of Arnold Trowell, whom she had so much admired, were engaged elsewhere, but Kathleen soon embarked on a passionate love affair with his twin brother, Garnet, and by early 1909 she was expecting his child. Nothing suggests that either Garnet or his parents were aware of the pregnancy, but the Trowell parents disapproved of the relationship and persuaded their son to break it off. Kathleen, meanwhile, entered into a hasty engagement with a man whom she barely knew, a singing teacher named George Bowden, who was similarly unaware of her condition. On 2 March 1909 she and Bowden were married at Paddington Register office with her faithful school friend, Ida Baker, as the only witness. That night, before the marriage had been consummated, Kathleen abandoned her husband. She later had a brief reunion with Garnet, who was on tour as a musician with the Moody-Manners Opera Company.

News of Kathleen’s marriage and desertion soon reached her parents in Wellington. On 27 May 1909 Annie arrived in London where she met with Bowden, who believed that the failure of the marriage had been caused by a lesbian relationship between Kathleen and Ida. Ida was despatched for a holiday in the Canary Islands, while Annie and Kathleen set off for a small spa in Bavaria called Bad Wörishofen. After a few days Annie left Kathleen and re-embarked for New Zealand. Although there is no evidence that she knew of her daughter’s pregnancy, on her return home Annie cut Kathleen out of her will. In late June, Kathleen had a miscarriage, but she remained in Bad Wörishofen for a further six months and embarked on a series of short descriptive stories, or ‘sketches’, based on her experiences as a guest at a German ‘pension’. These stories were among the first of Mansfield’s works to appear in England and formed the basis of her first collection, (1911).

While she was in Bavaria, Kathleen became friendly with a group of Polish intellectuals and formed a close relationship with a twenty-eight-year-old literary critic and translator named Floryan Sobieniowski. Floryan is credited with introducing Kathleen to the short stories of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, probably in German translation. Chekhov was the single greatest literary influence on Mansfield’s writing, and his name appears frequently in her letters and notebooks. Throughout her subsequent career as a writer, she studied his stories and techniques and sought to emulate his achievements. Chekhov died from tuberculosis in 1904, and when in 1917 Mansfield was diagnosed with the same disease, it further increased the bond she felt with him.

After her return to London in January 1910, Kathleen stayed briefly with Bowden, who introduced her to A. R. Orage, the editor of a socialist weekly called the . At this time the was considered to be one of the liveliest intellectual publications in London, with articles by Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells appearing regularly in its pages. Over the following year and a half, Orage published twelve of Mansfield’s stories, including her ‘Pension Sketches’ and a number of humorous contributions and poems. Only three minor pieces were published elsewhere. By now all traces of Wilde’s influence had vanished from Mansfield’s work, and in much of her writing she adopts a new, satirical stance encouraged by her friendship with Orage’s sharp-tongued mistress, Beatrice Hastings, with whom she occasionally collaborated.

Mansfield’s first collection, , was published on 11 December 1911. It contained thirteen stories, seven of which revolve around her life at the pension. The ‘’ are satirical in tone and represent the Germans as boorish and chauvinistic. In ‘’ and ‘’, Mansfield mercilessly mocks German attitudes to food and the digestive processes; in ‘’ she targets snobbery; and in ‘’ she imputes an array of unattractive characteristics to her fellow-guests, ranging from sentimentality to greed. The writing is marred by the commentary of an intrusive, first person narrator, whose arch style is reminiscent of the work of Mansfield’s cousin, Elizabeth von Arnim. Elizabeth von Arnim was born Mary Annette Beauchamp and her book, , published in 1898, became a best-seller.

In three of the six remaining stories in the collection, the themes of peasant life and childbearing are presented with a brutal realism that recalls Chekhov’s handling of the same subjects. ‘’, which had already appeared in the , describes the suffocation of a baby by an exhausted nursemaid and was identified by Elizabeth Schneider in 1935 as a copy of Chekhov’s‘ . In 1951 this story became the subject of a heated correspondence in the , which considerably damaged Mansfield’s reputation and led to accusations of plagiarism. ‘’ is a chilling portrayal of a village woman’s subjugation to her husband and is considered to be the best story in the collection. ‘’ documents the burgeoning sexuality of a young woman, whose first sexual encounter is interrupted by the screams of her employer’s wife in childbirth. Sexuality also emerges as a recurring theme in ‘’ and ‘’. In ‘’ the figure of Andreas Binzer is the first of her many portrayals of her father and the subject is once again childbirth, this time Mansfield’s own birth in Wellington, sketchily transposed to a German setting.

In a German Pension is not Mansfield’s best work, and in 1920 she strongly resisted her publisher’s proposals for a new edition. Nevertheless, in many of the stories, the imprint of Mansfield’s developing literary talents is visible. Her gift for dialogue is strongly in evidence throughout and in stories such as ‘A Birthday’ and ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’, she minimises the intrusion of an independent authorial voice and breaks new ground by moving the action to within the minds of her characters through the use of interior monologue.

Despite its shortcomings, the collection was well-received and helped to establish Mansfield’s reputation in the London literary world. Reviewers admired the cleverness of her writing and described her style as ‘impish’, but the success of was due, in part, to its anti-German sentiments, which struck a chord with British readers at a time when they feared a German invasion.

In late March 1910 Mansfield suffered a severe attack of what she believed to be ‘peritonitis’. After a painful operation, she was rescued from a dingy nursing home by Ida, who took her to convalesce by the sea. At the time she appeared to make a complete recovery, but for the next eight years she continued to be plagued by unexplained pains, which she attributed to rheumatism. She only discovered in 1918 that the true cause of her illness was gonorrhoea, probably contracted from Floryan.

Increasingly Mansfield began to move in the circle of writers and intellectuals to which she had been introduced by Orage and Hastings. Her private life was Bohemian. She lived alone and had a number of male admirers and several affairs. She also adopted a variety of poses and disguises and, in response to the wave of Russophilia that was sweeping Europe at this time, began to use Russian variations of her name, such as Katya and Katerina. Only her girlhood acquaintances continued to call her ‘Kass’ or Kathleen. During the summer of 1911 Harold and Annie brought their family to London for the coronation of King George V. A reconciliation seems to have taken place between Mansfield and her parents, but she continued to lead a very independent life and her seventeen-year-old brother, Leslie, was the only member of her family to whom she felt close.

In December 1911, shortly after the publication of In a German Pension, Mansfield sent a crime story called ‘’ to the editor of a radical new magazine called . The story, which is set in New Zealand, so impressed John Middleton Murry, the twenty-two-year-old Oxford undergraduate who edited Rhythm, that he asked a mutual friend to introduce him to the author. A few weeks later a dinner party was arranged at which Mansfield and Murry met. Murry was captivated by Mansfield’s elegance and intelligence and they instantly struck up a friendship. Before long Mansfield had persuaded him to leave Oxford, and in April 1912 he became her lodger. Within a few weeks, their friendship had turned into the most enduring love affair of Mansfield’s life and eventually led to marriage.

Mansfield’s involvement with Murry had professional repercussions. Orage and Hastings turned against her and she stopped contributing to The New Age. Instead she joined Murry as his assistant in the publication of Rhythm. During the second half of 1912 and early 1913, Mansfield wrote a wide range of stories, poems, and reviews for Rhythm and its short-lived successor, Blue Review. Her reviews already display the critical skills which she later exercised in 1919 and 1920 as a book reviewer for the Athenaeum. Her poetry is of minor interest—its most curious aspect being the Russian pseudonym, Boris Petrovsky, under which some of it was written. Mansfield’s fascination with Russia also emerges in a series of pseudo Russian pieces entitled ‘Tales of a Courtyard’, whose focus on low life and crime has strong echoes of Dostoevsky.

In addition to ‘The Woman at the Store’, Mansfield wrote two further New Zealand stories for Rhythm called ‘’ and ‘’, which also deal with low life and crime. ‘The Woman at the Store’ is a gripping tale of murder in the rugged back blocks of New Zealand, in which Mansfield adopts a naturalistic approach and successfully exploits the interplay between the menacing landscape and the sinister figure of the woman. In ‘Ole Underwood’ the central figure is a vagrant former sailor, whose mind has become unhinged after spending twenty years in prison for the murder of his wife. Mansfield uses the sordid, urban environment to intensify the atmosphere and captures Ole Underwood’s insanity by moving the viewpoint in and out of his demented consciousness. ‘Millie’ is the grim story of a manhunt, in which the plot unfolds through a combination of interior monologue and external narration.

All three of these stories show Mansfield exploring the possibilities of naturalism and responding to the contemporary vogue for ‘savagery’, which found its artistic expression in the savage ‘Fauve’ paintings of the Post Impressionists. Her engagement with savagery and naturalism, however, was a passing phase—not unlike her earlier fascination with Wilde—and there is evidence from other stories written at this time that she was moving towards a new style that was entirely her own. Two slight stories from this period foreshadow the prominence of childhood memories in Mansfield’s later writing. In ‘’ the figure of Kezia, who is Mansfield as a child and is the central consciousness of ‘Prelude’, makes her first appearance. In ‘’ Mansfield highlights her childhood feelings of injustice and rejection. A third story, ‘’, in which Mansfield successfully sustains the viewpoint of a small child, is of greater interest and has the additional merit of being the only portrayal of New Zealand Maoris in Mansfield’s writing.

Mansfield’s stories for Rhythm and Blue Review were written against a backdrop of financial and domestic uncertainty. She soon discovered that Murry’s naïveté in business matters had landed Rhythm heavily in debt with its printers, and she persuaded her own publisher, Stephen Swift, to take over publication. In September 1912, in a mood of optimism, she and Murry left London and rented a house in the English countryside, near Chichester. There, among others, they entertained Rupert Brooke and Eddie Marsh, who was a wealthy patron of the arts and worked at the Admiralty as the private secretary of Winston Churchill. In October, however, Stephen Swift was declared bankrupt and he absconded to Europe, leaving Murry responsible for Rhythm’s debts. Murry and Mansfield had to give up their house in the country and returned to a one-roomed apartment in London’s Chancery Lane where they struggled to keep Rhythm afloat. Mansfield pledged her annual allowance from her father to pay the printers, and she and Murry expended much of their energy seeking revenue from advertisements. Their courageous stance won the admiration of London’s literary world, and by early 1913 a group of distinguished artists and writers had offered to contribute their work to Rhythm free of charge. Among these were Rupert Brooke, Gilbert Cannan, Hugh Walpole, Frank Swinnerton, Lord Dunsaney, and D. H. Lawrence.

In March 1913, plagued by ill health, Mansfield moved to a cottage in a Buckinghamshire village. She was also being troubled by Floryan, who had been in England for some time and was in financial difficulties. He now revealed that he had retained Mansfield’s earlier love letters to him and was prepared to use them as blackmail. At this stage Mansfield managed to placate him, but in 1920 he succeeded in extracting £40 from her for the letters—a sum which equalled her advance from the publisher, Constable, for her second collection, .

The final issue of Rhythm was published on 15 March 1913 and was succeeded in May by the Blue Review, in which Mansfield is listed as Associate Editor. Max Beerbohm, Walter de la Mare, D. H. Lawrence, and Hugh Walpole contributed to the first edition, which also contained a minor story by Mansfield called ‘’. Despite its distinguished supporters, the survived for only three issues and in July, much to the relief of Mansfield and Murry, it collapsed. For them, the most significant outcome of their association with the Blue Review was the friendship to which it led with D. H. Lawrence and Frieda Weekley. Their first meeting took place in June 1913, when Lawrence and Frieda called on the offices of the Blue Review. The two couples instantly warmed to each other and a few weeks later, they spent a country weekend together. Shortly afterwards Lawrence and Frieda returned to Europe where they urged Mansfield and Murry to join them. This offer was declined, but on two later occasions, in 1914 and 1916, Mansfield and Murry spent several months living in the English countryside as neighbours of the Lawrences.

Mansfield’s friendship with Lawrence had no discernible influence on her writing, and she eventually became exasperated by his preoccupation with sex and his constant quarrels with Frieda. Lawrence, on the other hand, put his association with Mansfield to extensive literary use. In his novel (1920), the figures of Gudrun and Gerald are based on Mansfield and Murry. In The Rainbow (1915), Lawrence’s depiction of a sexual relationship between a younger and older woman bears a strong resemblance to Mansfield’s experiences with Edith Bendall, which suggests that it may have been drawn from his conversations with Mansfield.

After the collapse of the Blue Review, Mansfield and Murry gave up the cottage in the country and moved from the small apartment in Chancery Lane, which had served as the offices for Rhythm and the Blue Review, to a larger apartment in Baron’s Court. Mansfield was now free to write, but she did not find the atmosphere conducive to creativity and her efforts met with little success. Murry also had literary aspirations, and in December he and Mansfield moved to an apartment at 31 rue de Tournon, on the Parisian Left Bank, where they hoped it would be easier to focus on their writing.

Murry believed that his earnings as a freelance journalist would be sufficient to support both of them in Paris—although he was still making quarterly payments towards the outstanding debts of Rhythm. In February 1914, however, he was declared bankrupt and was obliged to return to London to take up regular employment as an art critic with the . Mansfield remained in Paris where a friend of Murry’s, the novelist Francis Carco, helped her to sell their furniture to pay the fine for breaking the lease.

During her time in Paris, Mansfield wrote only one story, called ‘’. It describes a young couple, named Henry and Edna, who find a dream cottage in the English countryside and reflects some of Mansfield’s own longings for a more settled domestic life. The slender narrative is overburdened with detail, but the working of Henry’s inner consciousness is captured with skill. The climax, in the final two sentences, is an early example of Mansfield’s later practice of bringing her stories to an abrupt close without any formal conclusion.

A few weeks after her return to London, Mansfield moved with Murry into dreary lodgings in Fulham. The Parisian episode had left them short of money and they suffered from frequent bouts of ill health. During this unhappy and unproductive period, Lawrence and Frieda came to dinner and Mansfield’s feelings of frustration were further exacerbated by the contrast in their fortunes. Since the publication of in 1913, Lawrence’s reputation had soared and he had been offered a £300 advance for his next novel. Furthermore, Frieda’s previous marriage had been dissolved and, unlike Mansfield and Murry, they were free to marry. After Lawrence and Frieda had left, Mansfield and Murry had a violent argument which led to their moving, a few days later, to more cheerful accommodation in Chelsea. From there, on 13 July, they set off to act as witnesses at the registry office marriage of the Lawrences. A photograph of this occasion shows Mansfield standing beside Lawrence, in a wide-brimmed hat, looking remarkably elegant. The only other witness was an Irish lawyer friend named Gordon Campbell, who later inherited the title of Lord Glenavy. On her wedding day Frieda gave Mansfield the ring from her former marriage, which Mansfield wore until her death.

At midnight on 4 August 1914, Britain entered World War I and for the next four years Mansfield shared, with millions of others, in the deprivations and sufferings of war. Her only brother and some of her closest friends were killed, leaving Mansfield with lasting psychological scars and a conviction that the world—and literature—had been irrevocably changed by the horrors of war.

In October 1914 Mansfield and Murry moved once more to Buckinghamshire, where they rented a cottage three miles away from the Lawrences. A few weeks later, in the aftermath of a violent quarrel between Lawrence and Frieda, Mansfield met Samuel Koteliansky. Koteliansky was a Russian Jew who for political reasons had emigrated to England from the Ukraine in 1911. He was a regular weekend guest of the Lawrences and became one of Mansfield’s closest friends. Initially, however, he was also her ardent admirer and showered her with gifts of chocolates and cigarettes. Murry, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly obsessed with the work of Dostoevsky, whose novels had been recently translated into English. To Mansfield’s disgust, he spent many of his evenings in intense, metaphysical discussions with Lawrence and Gordon Campbell from which she felt excluded. Their relationship suffered and as her feelings for Murry cooled, Mansfield embarked on an ardent correspondence with Carco, who was serving in the army in France.

In February 1915 Mansfield set off for Paris. She borrowed the money for the trip from her brother, Leslie, who had recently arrived in England to join a British regiment. In France, Mansfield embarked on a four-day tryst with Carco, which took place in the War Zone behind the French lines and is fictionalised in her story ‘’. But Mansfield’s love affair with Carco was short-lived and by 25 February she had returned to Murry in Buckinghamshire. In the meantime, she continued to correspond with Koteliansky, who had enlisted Murry’s assistance in a venture to publish works by Russian authors in English translation. This project, to which Mansfield also contributed, gave her an opportunity to study the literary techniques of Russian writers, who had been developing new approaches to fiction for several decades.

During 1914 Mansfield wrote very little. The only complete story by her that survives is a work of uneven quality called ‘’. In March 1915, however, her desire to write revived and she went to Paris where she completed a story called ‘’, in which she describes an encounter between a naïve young woman and a lecherous old man. As in much of Mansfield’s work at this time, sexual undercurrents play an important role, but she handles them with a far greater subtlety than she does in earlier stories such as ‘.’ She also successfully sustains the viewpoint of the governess by moving the narration seamlessly between an external vantage point and interior monologue.

By far the most significant writing that Mansfield did at this time, however, was the first portion of her story ‘’ (1930), which was later revised and became one of her most celebrated works under the title ‘Prelude’. ‘The Aloe’ marks an important step in the evolution of Mansfield’s artistic method and is her longest piece of writing. In it, she distils all that she had learnt through practice and experimentation over the previous years in a sequence of twelve atmospheric episodes set in the familiar world of her New Zealand childhood. The story is based on the move made by Mansfield, portrayed as ‘Kezia’, at the age of four and a half, from her first home in Wellington to her family’s new house in the countryside. The mysterious central image is provided by an aloe tree, which seems to preside over the fate of the household and only flowers once in a hundred years. As the story unfolds through the consciousness of the characters, the presence of the author is barely discernible. The personalities of the characters are not described, but rather ‘revealed’ through minutely observed details of their appearance and behaviour—or by their own voices. There is little plot and only the minimum of external action. Instead, the focus is on the subtleties of human relationships and the inner lives of the characters—who are clearly recognisable as the members of the Beauchamp family. Many of the technical innovations in ‘The Aloe’ are Mansfield’s own, which she described to Dorothy Brett in October 1917 as ‘more or less my own invention.’

Murry, , Vol 1, p. 84. (Letter to the Hon. Dorothy Brett, Thur., Oct. 7, 1917.)

The approach was so radical that Mansfield felt obliged to warn Murry: ‘I expect you will think I am dotty when you read it . . . Its queer stuff.’

O’Sullivan and Scott, , Vol. 1, p.168. (Letter to Murry of 25 March 1915.)

In May, after a further burst of writing in Paris, Mansfield laid ‘The Aloe’ aside—believing it to be completed. The following year, however, she rediscovered the manuscript and began reworking it in a lengthy process that was not finalised until 1917.

In June 1915 Mansfield and Murry moved to a comfortable house, with a garden, at 5 Acacia Road in St John’s Wood. Their financial situation had improved since Murry’s recent employment as a reviewer for the , and Mansfield had also received an increase in her allowance from her father. In August, Leslie came to stay at Acacia Road for his last leave before leaving for France. He and Mansfield spent many hours sharing their memories of home and shortly after he left, Mansfield wrote a vivid evocation of her childhood, in which the turbulent feelings of an adolescent girl are mirrored by the wildness of the Wellington wind. This story appeared in October 1915 as ‘ in a short-lived magazine founded by Murry and Lawrence called , but it was later renamed ‘’.

On 7 October 1915 Leslie was killed in France by a grenade which exploded in his hand. Mansfield was devastated and remained in a state of depression for many months afterwards. Acacia Road was so full of memories of Leslie that Mansfield no longer wished to live there, and she and Murry departed for the South of France where they found little of the warmth and consolation that they had anticipated. Relations between them once again became strained and, in early December, Murry returned to England, leaving Mansfield in a hotel in the small seaside town of Bandol. He spent Christmas at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire as the guest of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who had gathered around her a brilliant circle of writers and intellectuals, which included Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, and Lytton Strachey. Lonely and unhappy in Bandol, Mansfield bombarded Murry with letters. On New Year’s Day 1916 he rejoined her and together they moved to a small house called the Villa Pauline where, for three and a half months, they enjoyed one of their few periods of complete harmony.

Murry at once set to work on a long-planned book on Dostoevsky, but Mansfield, who was still struggling with depression, abandoned any attempts at writing and turned her attention to the novels of Dostoevsky. The observations that she makes on his methods in her journal reveal the acuteness of her mind and her new appreciation of human suffering. There is also a lengthy entry—indicating the precariousness of her mental state—in which she records an extraordinary ‘vision’ of her brother. From the pain of bereavement, Mansfield forged a new literary philosophy which she expresses in her journal as follows:

Now, really, what is it that I do want to write? . . . never has my desire been so ardent. Only the form that I would chooses has changed entirely. . . . The people who lived or whom I wished to bring into my stories don’t interest me any more. The plots of my stories leave me perfectly cold. . . . Now—now I want to write recollections of my own country. . . . Oh, I want for one moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the Old World.’

John Middleton Murry, ed., , Def. Ed. (London: Constable and Co Ltd., 1967), pp. 93-94.

She links this change of direction specifically to what she perceives as a debt of love both to her birthplace, New Zealand, and to her dead brother. Shortly afterwards she came across the manuscript of ‘The Aloe’ lying among her papers. In subject matter and outline, it corresponded perfectly to her new literary philosophy, and she spent the remainder of her time at the Villa Pauline reworking the text.

Since January, Lawrence had been writing to Mansfield and Murry in an attempt to persuade them to join him and Frieda in Cornwall. They eventually agreed, and in April 1916 they left the Villa Pauline and moved, with some misgivings, into an empty cottage next to the Lawrences. Mansfield found that living on close quarters with the Lawrences in Cornwall was even more difficult than living with them in Buckinghamshire. Her hatred of the stony countryside and the quarrels between Lawrence and Frieda disrupted her creative flow. She wrote nothing and the new-found harmony of her relationship with Murry foundered. In June she and Murry moved to another cottage, thirty miles from the Lawrences, but she was still unhappy and sought to console herself by visiting London and Garsington without Murry.

In September, Mansfield and Murry returned to London where Murry had been appointed to a department of the War Office as a translator and reviewer of the foreign press. Murry and Lawrence had quarrelled in Cornwall and the friendship between the two couples cooled. At the same time an unexplained estrangement occurred between Mansfield and Koteliansky. It lasted for the next two years and was probably related to the quarrel with Lawrence. Meanwhile, Mansfield and Murry were becoming increasingly involved with Ottoline Morrell and her circle at Garsington. They took up lodgings on the ground floor of a house in Bloomsbury, in which two young painters, Dorothy Brett and Dora Carrington, whom they had met at Garsington, also lived. Murry started writing affectionate notes to Ottoline, while Mansfield carried on a mild flirtation with her long-term admirer, Bertrand Russell. In November, Lytton Strachey arranged the first meeting between Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Over Christmas at Garsington, Mansfield wrote a skit on Chekhov’s (1903), called , which was acted by the guests on Boxing Day to widespread acclaim.

The house in Bloomsbury did not offer Mansfield the peace she needed for her writing, and in February she moved, without Murry, to a one-roomed studio in Chelsea. Murry lodged nearby and came regularly for dinner. Ida Baker, who had recently returned from a two-year visit to Rhodesia, was also a frequent guest, and eventually gave up her own apartment to sleep behind a curtain in the studio. Mansfield had re-established contact with Orage, and over the next ten months she contributed a number of pieces to the New Age, including six ‘fragments’ and five comic dialogues in which she displays her keen ear for spoken language and her ready wit. The New Age also published three more stories: a brilliant and satirical portrait of Bowden called ‘’; a slight love story called ‘’ (later renamed ‘. and a light-hearted parody on a Russian theme called ‘.

During this productive period, Mansfield received a flattering approach for a story from Virginia and Leonard Woolf, who had recently set up the Hogarth Press. Mansfield offered them ‘The Aloe’, which she further revised, reducing it from 26,000 to 17,000 words and renaming it ‘Prelude’. ‘Prelude’ retains the structure and most of the main characters of ‘The Aloe’, but several lengthy digressions have been removed. Similarly, superfluous descriptions have been pruned and the dialogue has been cut back to increase its dramatic effect. Occasionally, a vivid new detail has been inserted to heighten the atmosphere. The only figure to undergo extensive revision is that of Mansfield’s mother, depicted as Linda Burnell, who becomes more elusive as a character and acquires a greater detachment. When the first edition of ‘Prelude’ was published in 1918, Virginia Woolf had to defend it from the criticisms of her family and friends. It did not reach a wider public, or receive the critical attention it merited, until 1920, when it was included in Mansfield’s second collection of short stories, . In an enthusiastic review of Bliss in the of 15 January 1921, a half column was devoted to ‘Prelude’, which is identified as one of the finest stories in the collection

Although Mansfield and Woolf had much in common as writers, they did not immediately warm to each other. Woolf was shocked when Mansfield unwisely regaled her with some of her youthful sexual escapades and took some time to appreciate the quality of her mind. Mansfield on the other hand recognised Woolf’s talent at an early stage, and both women enjoyed the professional interest of their conversations. In August 1917 Mansfield wrote to Woolf in terms that openly acknowledged their shared literary objectives: ‘It was good to have time to talk to you. We have got the same job, Virginia and it is really very curious and thrilling that we should both, quite apart from each other, be after so very nearly the same thing. We are you know; there’s no denying it.’

O’Sullivan and Scott, , Vol. 1, p. 327. (Letter to Virginia Woolf of c. 23 August 1917.)

In 1919, however, she alienated Woolf by writing a critical review of her novel (1919). After the publication of Mansfield’s collection Bliss, in 1920, Woolf overcame her professional jealousy and wrote to congratulate her. Mansfield replied, but their friendship lapsed when she failed to respond to a second letter.

At the end of 1917 Mansfield became seriously ill after catching a chill at Garsington. On her return to London she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, with which she appeared to have been infected for some time. At a time when the only known cure for tuberculosis was rest and sunshine, all Mansfield’s doctor could do was recommend that she went abroad to avoid the English winter. On 7 January 1918, therefore, she set off alone for Bandol which she found altered very much for the worse by four years of war. The hotel was half-deserted and bitterly cold and Mansfield soon became deeply depressed. Her feelings of loneliness and despair are poured out in a stream of letters to Murry and prompted the writing of one of her darkest stories, ‘’ (1920).

Like most of Mansfield’s stories, the subject matter of ‘Je ne Parle pas Francais’ is drawn from personal experience. The story unfolds through the first person narration of a Frenchman named Raoul Duquette, for whom Carco is the model. Its central figures are Mansfield, portrayed as the fragile and innocent ‘Mouse’, and Murry, as her spineless fiancé, Dick Harmon, who abandons her in Paris. Mansfield wrote ‘Je ne Parle pas Francais’ in a mood of intense pessimism and she describes it in a letter to Murry as her ‘cry against corruption’.

O’Sullivan and Scott, , Vol. 2, p. 54. (Letter to Murry of 3 Feb 1918.)

The sexually ambivalent figure of Duquette symbolises amorality, and Mansfield uses his inner reflections to reveal not only his depravity, but also her own disgust with contemporary society. Her depiction of Murry is equally unflattering and reflects her feeling that he had abandoned her at one of the most difficult times in her life. Although Murry was very hurt by the story, he immediately recognised its force and suggested that its inspiration might have been Dostoevsky’s (1864)—a link which is generally accepted.

Murry’s wartime work prevented him from leaving England, but within a few weeks Ida was able to join Mansfield at Bandol. By now, however, Mansfield was absorbed in her writing and resented the intrusion. Nevertheless, Ida’s arrival was timely, for within a few days Mansfield suffered her first lung haemorrhage. She was badly shaken and recorded her emotions in her notebook: ‘Oh, yes, of course I am frightened . . . I don’t want to find this is real consumption, perhaps its going to gallop—who knows—and I shan’t have my work written, Thats what matters. How unbearable it would be to die, leave “scraps”, “bits”, nothing real finished.’

Margaret Scott, , Vol. 2, p. 125.

‘Je ne Parle pas Francais’ was published as a single edition in January 1920 by the Heron Press, which was set up by Murry and his brother, Richard. In April it received a favourable review in the Athenaeum, in which Mansfield is described as ‘The Story-Writing Genius’.

J. W. N. Sullivan, ‘’, , 2 April 1920, p. 447.

She completed two further stories at Bandol, ‘’, in which the adult world is seen from the viewpoint of a little boy, and ‘’. In ‘Bliss’, which first appeared in August 1918 in the , Mansfield explores the feelings of a young, married woman named Bertha Young, who discovers, in course of an elegant, London dinner party that her husband has been unfaithful to her. Erotic undercurrents flow between Bertha and a beautiful, female guest, and the story gains a further symbolic dimension from the image of a blossoming pear tree. Despite its obvious cleverness, however, ‘Bliss’ is not as highly regarded as ‘Prelude’, or many of the stories that followed it. Contemporary reviewers praised Mansfield’s grasp of psychology, but, as Sylvia Berkman points out in her critical study of Mansfield’s work, the reader is often alienated by the overwrought and gushing tone of Bertha’s interior monologue and by the superficiality of the characters.

Mansfield was anxious to leave the isolation of Bandol at the earliest opportunity, but in wartime France she had difficulty in obtaining the necessary travel permit. Finally in March she and Ida set off for England by train. It was a nightmare journey and in Paris they were forced, by the German bombardment, to interrupt their journey. They remained trapped there for three weeks with German shells falling every eighteen minutes. Mansfield spent many hours nightly sheltering in the cellars of her hotel, and by the time she reached England her health had deteriorated still further. She had lost over a stone in weight and Murry was shocked by the change in her appearance. When Mansfield visited her London doctor, he recommended that she enter a sanatorium, but Mansfield rejected his suggestion and decided to attempt a cure at home.

In late April, Mansfield’s divorce from Bowden was finalised, and on 3 May 1918 she and Murry were married at the same South Kensington Register Officer at which the Lawrences had married four years earlier. Their witnesses were Murry’s long standing friend, the Scottish painter, John Duncan Fergusson, and Dorothy Brett. Afterwards they planned a small party, but the occasion was clouded by Mansfield’s ill health and within two weeks of their marriage, she and Murry were once again separated. Mansfield’s efforts to cure herself at home had met with little success and she agreed, reluctantly, to convalesce in a comfortable hotel in Cornwall where she could benefit from sea air and country food. Murry, meanwhile, had leased a house for them in Hampstead, which was considered a more healthy location than central London. At the end of August he and Mansfield moved to their new home at 2 Portland Villas where they employed three domestic staff and Ida as a housekeeper.

Soon after she moved to Portland Villas, Mansfield re-established contact with Koteliansky. Their friendship revived and by November Mansfield had taken on Murry’s earlier task of polishing and improving Koteliansky’s translations from Russian. Over the next four years, Mansfield assisted Koteliansky with at least six works of Russian translation. The most significant of these was a collection of Chekhov’s letters, which appeared in 1919 in instalments in the . Chekhov’s letters gave Mansfield a greater understanding of his personal philosophy and further increased her admiration for him as a writer and as an individual.

During October, Mansfield visited two lung specialists both of whom insisted that her only chance of recovery lay in entering a sanatorium. She preferred, however, to follow the advice of her new doctor, Victor Sorapure, with whom she had established a warm friendship. Sorapure sympathised with Mansfield’s view that a protracted stay in a sanatorium would her do more harm than good, because the strict regime would hinder her writing. In addition to the sufferings of tuberculosis, she was continuing to experience agonising pains in her joints. Woolf came to tea in November and describes Mansfield in her diary as follows: ‘Katherine was up, but husky and feeble, crawling about the room like an old woman.’

Anne Olivier Bell, ed., , Vol. 1 (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 216. (Entry for 9 Nov 1918.)

Shortly before Christmas, Mansfield learnt from Sorapure that the pains, which for the past eight years she had attributed to rheumatism, were caused by gonorrhoea. For the next two months she submitted to a course of injections, which brought on regular bouts of high fever, but did little to cure her.

On 11 November 1918, World War I ended. Mansfield and Murry joined in the universal rejoicing and celebrated Christmas in high spirits with a group of their closest friends. Within the War Office, Murry had risen to the post of Chief Censor, but his editorial talents had been noticed by London’s literary establishment, and in February 1919 he was appointed as editor of the prestigious weekly journal, the Athenaeum. His new position brought with it a salary of £800 a year and offered Mansfield new opportunities for employment. She was invited by Murry to write the reviews of the novels, and over the next twenty months she wrote more than one hundred reviews, which did much to establish her reputation as a critic. After Mansfield’s death Murry collected the reviews and published them in 1930 under the title of .

Throughout 1919 Mansfield was fully occupied with writing reviews for the Athenaeum and translation work with Koteliansky. In June she expresses her enthusiasm for Chekhov’s letters in a letter to Koteliansky: ‘ I do my very best always with these wonderful letters . . . . May Tchekov live for ever.’

O’Sullivan and Scott, , Vol. 2, p. 324. (Letter to Koteliansky of 6 June 1919.)

In August, in another letter to Koteliansky, she is even more explicit: ‘Tchekhov has said the last word that has been said, so far, and more than that he has given us a sign of the way we should go . . . . My God, if I am sitting on the back bench, A. T. is my master.’

Ibid., p. 345. (Letter to Koteliansky of early August 1919.)

The only story that dates from this period is a delicate study of an unsatisfactory meeting between two friends, called ‘.

Mansfield’s mother had died in August 1918, and in August 1919 Harold arrived in London as a widower. He called on Mansfield and Murry in Hampstead. Mansfield greatly enjoyed the occasion and hoped that the meeting might prompt her father to make an increase in her allowance to help with her soaring medical expenses. Murry, however, was barely civil to his father-in-law and no increase was forthcoming. Mansfield’s continuing ill-health was adversely affecting her marriage. She and Murry slept in separate rooms and their moments of intimacy became increasingly rare.

In September, Mansfield set out for San Remo on the Italian Riviera where she and Ida planned to spend the winter, but within a few days of her arrival Mansfield was asked to leave the hotel in which she, Murry and Ida were staying. At that time the Italians regarded tuberculosis as a notifiable disease, and Mansfield’s condition was unmistakable. The manager, however, then offered to lease her a small villa on an isolated hillside, which she gratefully accepted. Once Mansfield and Ida were installed, Murry returned to London. At first the villa seemed ideal, but it was unheated and quite unsuitable for winter habitation. In the increasing cold and discomfort Mansfield’s health and temper deteriorated. She quarrelled violently with Ida and, as she struggled with suicidal depression and incipient pneumonia, she wrote a stream of near-hysterical letters to Murry.

At Christmas, Murry spent a few days at the villa. In the aftermath of his visit Mansfield felt calmer and more able to write. On Sunday 11 January 1920 she sat down and wrote a story, which she finished that same evening. It is the portrayal of a fretful invalid and her long-suffering husband, which Mansfield called ‘’. Her subject matter is clearly drawn from her own situation, but in ‘The Man Without a Temperament’ she achieves a new objectivity that gives the story a universal dimension. In 1921 it was described in the by Desmond MacCarthy as being, (with ‘Prelude’), the finest story in . At this stage in her life, Mansfield was striving for greater perfection in her work, driven by the fear that she might die before she had achieved her full literary potential. Inspired by Chekhov, she was also trying to overcome her own personal shortcomings in the belief that only those of the highest moral calibre could become great writers. The greater objectivity and compassion that begins to appear in Mansfield’s stories at this time is a reflection of her new beliefs—as is her belated recognition of Ida ’s devoted friendship.

Shortly after completing ‘The Man Without a Temperament’, Mansfield accepted the invitation of a wealthy cousin named Connie Beauchamp to join her and a friend, Jinnie Fullerton, at their luxurious villa in Menton. Mansfield was so ill that she was obliged to spend her first three weeks in Menton in an expensive nursing home where her unhappiness was compounded by a vicious letter from Lawrence. Unaware that he also had tuberculosis, he wrote: ‘I loathe you. You revolt me stewing in your consumption.’

O’Sullivan and Scott, , Vol. 3, p. 209. (Quoted in a letter to Murry of 7 Feb 1920.)

This outburst was quite unprovoked, but like Mansfield, Lawrence was susceptible to violent mood swings and fits of tubercular rage. To add to her troubles, Mansfield was worried about the cost of the nursing home, but the financial situation was eased when Murry negotiated an advance of £40 from the publisher, Constable, for a new collection of her stories.

Once Mansfield moved to the Villa Flora, she became happier. After years of financial hardship she basked in the luxury of the villa, which recalled many of the comforts of her childhood home. Connie Beauchamp and Jinnie Fullerton were devout Roman Catholics and tried their utmost to convert Mansfield to their faith. In March she told Ida, who had taken a job in the neighbourhood, that she was considering becoming a Catholic, but this notion was soon rejected. After three months in Menton, Mansfield returned to London where she continued to produce a steady flow of reviews for the Athenaeum, in which three of her short stories also appeared. In two of them, ‘Revelations’ and ‘The Escape’, Mansfield reveals her determination to write with greater honesty and integrity by ruthlessly exposing the weaknesses of the central, female figure, whose faults are very similar to her own.

By mid-August, Mansfield was again seriously ill. She describes her condition in her notebook: ‘I cough and cough and at each breath a dragging boiling bubbling sound is heard. I feel that my whole chest is boiling. I sip water. spit, sip, spit. I feel I must break my heart. And I can’t expand my chest—it’s as though the chest had collapsed. Life is—getting a new breath. Nothing else counts.’

Scott, , Vol. 2, p. 219.

In September, Mansfield returned to Menton where she and Ida took up residence in the Villa Isola Bella. The villa was rented from Jinnie Fullerton, who was living close by with Connie Beauchamp, and it came with an excellent French cook called Marie. At Isola Bella, Mansfield at last found herself in comfortable surroundings that were ideally suited for writing. A stream of stories followed: ‘’, ‘’, ‘’, ‘’, ‘’, ‘, ‘’, and ‘’.

Each one is a study of an aspect of female experience. In ‘The Young Girl’, Mansfield explores the expectancy and optimism of youth; in ‘Miss Brill’, ‘The Lady’s Maid’, and ‘Life of Ma Parker’ she portrays female poverty and loneliness; in ‘The Singing Lesson’ she examines a broken engagement; and in ‘The Stranger’ she describes the estrangement of a married couple after many months of separation. The most celebrated story of this group, however, is ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, which is the tale of two sisters whose lives have been overshadowed by their domineering father. The model for the most timid of the sisters, Constantia, is Ida, whose own father was an irascible Indian Army doctor. The story is built up from a series of scenes in which the sisters’ world is revealed through their relationships with different people. The narration alternates between flashbacks to the past and scenes in the present. In early 1921 Mansfield described her approach to her brother-in-law, Richard Murry, as ‘the outcome of the method—it just unfolds and opens.’

O’Sullivan and Scott, , Vol. 4, p. 156. (Letter to Richard Murry of 1 Jan 1921.)

When this story was published in May 1921 in the , it elicited a flattering comparison with Chekhov from the Russophile William Gerhardie: ‘I think it is . . . of quite amazing beauty. . . I don’t remember reading anything so intolerably real—stifling—since “The Three Sisters”.’

Letter from William Gerhardie to Katherine Mansfield of 17 June 1921, Mansfield Papers, MS-Papers-4004-37, ATL.

By now Mansfield was approaching the height of her literary powers, and the Isola Bella stories demonstrate not only the maturing of her creative abilities, but also her mastery of a wide range of literary techniques acquired through an intense dedication to craftsmanship. In a letter to Richard Murry, dated 17 January 1921, Mansfield voices her commitment: ‘It’s a very queer thing how craft comes into writing. I mean down to details. Par exemple. In ‘Miss Brill’ I chose not only the length of every sentence, but even the sound of every sentence—I chose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit her—and to fit her on that day at that very moment. After I’d written it I read it aloud—numbers of times—just as one would play over a musical composition, trying to get it nearer and nearer to the expression of Miss Brill—until it fitted her.’

O’Sullivan and Scott, , Vol. 4, p. 165. (Letter to Richard Murry of 17 Jan 1921.)

Much of the success of Mansfield’s characterisation rests on the authenticity of the language in which her characters speak and think. The vocabulary and diction of the downtrodden cleaning woman, Ma Parker, is reproduced with astonishing fidelity and mirrors the limitations of her horizons. Mansfield also uses this skill to delineate human relationships—such as the gulf that exists between Ma Parker and the ‘literary gentleman’ who employs her. His incomprehension of Ma Parker’s sufferings is encapsulated in a few short lines of condescending dialogue. Another of Mansfield’s frequently used devices is her practice of associating emotion with an inanimate object to convey feelings. In ‘Miss Brill’, for example, the old woman’s loneliness is emphasised by the conversations which she holds with her fur tippet. In ‘The Young Girl’ Mansfield heightens the mood through the visualisation, in minute and vivid detail, of sensuous images of flowers and food, which echo the sensuous beauty of the youthful heroine.

Only ‘’ falls short of Mansfield’s new artistic standards as she vents her feelings of jealousy towards Princess Bibesco, with whom Murry had been carrying on a flirtation. During November and December 1920 the almost daily correspondence between Mansfield and Murry grew increasingly acrimonious. Overtly, the cause was an unflattering photograph of Mansfield, which had appeared, with Murry’s authorisation, in a weekly paper called the , but the underlying reasons were more probably her ill-health and her suspicion that Murry’s affections were straying. On 8 December, their quarrel culminated in Mansfield’s resignation as a reviewer for the Athenaeum. At Christmas, Murry came out to Isola Bella where relations between him and Mansfield were further strained by the stream of letters that arrived from Princess Bibesco. During Murry’s visit, however, a reconciliation took place, and he decided to give up his editorship of the Athenaeum so that he could join Mansfield at Menton.

Throughout this difficult period in her personal life, Mansfield’s reputation as a writer was growing. On 2 December 1920 her second collection, Bliss, was published. Although it did not contain her most recent stories, it included ‘Prelude’, ‘Je ne Parle pas Français’, and ‘The Man Without a Temperament’ and was widely and favourably reviewed. In February 1921 an American issue was brought out by Knopf. In his review of 11 May in the , Conrad Aiken made the following comments: ‘Miss Mansfield is brilliant—she has, more conspicuously than any contemporary writer of fiction one calls to mind, a fine, an infinitely inquisitive sensibility’. Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic remarked on the affinity between Mansfield and Chekhov, but Aiken was careful to stress the individuality of her talent: ‘One has not read a page of Miss Mansfield’s book before one has said “Chekhov”: but one has not read two pages before Chekhov is forgotten.’

‘’, Conrad Aiken, , 11 May 1921, pp 210-211.

Mansfield was undoubtedly gratified by this public recognition of her abilities, but in her declining state of health, she was becoming increasingly preoccupied with spiritual matters and the desire to make amends for the shortcomings of her youth. In November, after months of silence, she initiated a correspondence with her father and asked his forgiveness for her past behaviour. In February 1921 she wrote a conciliatory letter to Koteliansky, with whom she had once again quarrelled, but he did not reply and it was many months before their friendship was re-established. She also wrote warmly to Orage, thanking him for his guidance to her as a young writer.

In March 1921 Ida returned to London to pack up the house in Hampstead. Mansfield missed her help and found Murry’s presence more of an irritation than a support. She wrote no further stories, and in May she decided to move with Ida to Switzerland where she hoped to find a cure. Murry, meanwhile returned to England where he was to deliver a series of lectures at Oxford. For much of May, Mansfield stayed in a hotel in Montreux, where she tried to disguise her tubercular condition by claiming to have a weak heart. In June she moved to the little town of Sierre to place herself under the supervision of a specialist named Dr. Spahlinger. There she was rejoined by Murry, and at the end of June they moved to a house in the pine forests high above Sierre called Chalet des Sapins. Ida lodged in the village and took a job in a nearby clinic.

At Chalet des Sapins, Mansfield and Murry enjoyed another of their rare periods of harmony—not unlike their stay at the Villa Pauline in early 1916. The peace and beauty of the surroundings contributed to their happiness, and Mansfield experienced a lengthy burst of creativity. Despite the success of Bliss, however, she still had financial concerns. Her medical bills were mounting, and to meet them she accepted a commission from the editor of the Spherefor six stories at ten guineas each. These stories were written under pressure and not all of them are Mansfield’s best work. In two of them, ‘’ and ‘’, the subject matter has been taken from Chekhov (‘’ also has a Chekhovian counterpart), but among the six are also two of Mansfield’s finest stories in which she reverts once more for inspiration to her New Zealand childhood. ‘’ describes the emotions of a young girl who encounters a cynical, older man at her first ball, while ‘’ gives a flawless account, from the perspective of a child, of the sea voyage between the North and South islands of New Zealand.

Mansfield’s notebooks reveal that she was often dissatisfied with her commercially-driven writing for the Sphere. At the same time, a new story was taking shape in her mind that was a far truer reflection of her talents and is considered by many critics to be her masterpiece. On 10 September, after nine hours of writing, Mansfield completed a continuation of ‘Prelude’, which she called ‘’. The cast of characters is drawn from Mansfield’s family circle and includes many of the same figures as ‘Prelude’. The story is in twelve episodes, each of which revolves around a different character. It opens with a lyrical description of the native bush that surrounded the Beauchamp’s summer cottage in Wellington Harbour and goes on to trace the activities of the different members of the household and their neighbours in the course of a summer day. As the story progresses, the viewpoint shifts from person to person to create a picture of their widely differing personalities and the complexities of their relationships. Mansfield excels in her portrayal of the children, and their game of cards in the wash-house is one of the most celebrated scenes in the story.

In ‘At the Bay’, Mansfield returns to many of the techniques of ‘Prelude’, but she imposes a far more rigorous temporal framework. The narrative is compressed within one day rather than three and is punctuated by fluctuations of mood that reflect the changing atmosphere of a seaside environment as it passes from the cool of dawn, through the heat of midday, to the warmth of a summer night. With ‘Prelude’ and ‘Je ne Parle pas Français’, ‘At the Bay’ is among Mansfield’s longest works and is one of the few in which she portrays a whole community.

‘At the Bay’ was favourably received both when it first appeared in the in January 1922 and on its inclusion a month later in Mansfield’s third collection, (1922). In an overview of Mansfield’s work, which was published in the shortly after her death in 1923, Martin Armstrong commented as follows:

Her chief characteristic is an exquisite sensibility. . . . Her stories fall roughly into two classes. In one we are shown a personality reacting more or less acutely to a moment of psychological crisis or revealed for a moment in its own special psychological atmosphere . . . . And there is the other class which presents, as it were, two or three yards out of a long strip of unimportant events in the life of an unimportant family—stories such as ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, with no beginning, no middle, and no end, which nevertheless are such complete and exquisitely formed works of art because the writer’s sensibility acts upon the whole as a flux and melts it into a single experience . . . .

Martin Armstrong, , 10 Feb 1923, p. 211.

From September 1921 to January 1922 was one of the most productive periods of Mansfield’s life, during which she completed ‘At the Bay’ and wrote eight other stories—although four of these were unfinished. Two of her best-loved New Zealand stories, ‘’ (after which her third collection was named) and ‘’, date from this time. ‘The Garden Party’ is set in Wellington at the luxurious house occupied by her parents from 1898 to 1907 and revolves around the theme of her family’s reactions to the death of a workman on the day of a garden party. Through a series of perfectly executed scenes, Mansfield skilfully contrasts the frivolity of the preparations for the party with the bewilderment of a child confronting death for the first time. In ‘The Doll’s House’, Mansfield reverts to the Beauchamp’s earlier home in Karori and once again displays her outstanding ability to depict the speech and behaviour of children. Like ‘The Garden Party’, this story contains a social message, but Mansfield makes her point obliquely by using the gift of a doll’s house to highlight the inequalities of the society in which she grew up. A third story, ‘’, in which Mansfield describes a spoilt young woman who invites a beggar girl to tea, can also be read as social commentary, but Mansfield’s lightness of touch ensures that none of her stories lapses into crude didacticism.

Of her four unfinished stories, ‘’ (which was used as the title to her fourth and posthumous collection) and ‘’ are the most interesting. The lively tone of ‘The Doves’ Nest’, with its typically Mansfieldian cast of a household of women, echoes much of her earlier work. ‘A Married Man’s Story’, in contrast, is written in a sombre style, through a first person male narrator, for whom the only counterpart in her previous work is the very different figure of Raoul Duquette in ‘Je ne Parle pas Français.’

Mansfield’s health was continuing to deteriorate. In October she wrote another letter to Koteliansky asking for information about a Russian doctor named Ivan Manoukhin, who claimed to have discovered a new cure for tuberculosis. On this occasion Koteliansky replied and their friendship revived. Murry was sceptical about Manoukhin’s methods, but Mansfield was convinced that he could help her and made plans to visit his clinic in Paris. Shortly before her departure Mansfield started to read a book called (1921), which Orage had sent Murry to review. Its purported author was M. B. Oxon, the pseudonym of a theosophist contributor to the , but its contents bore a strong resemblance to the semi-mystical teachings of the Russian intellectual, Piotr Ouspensky and his mentor, George Gurdjieff. Mansfield was fascinated by the book, although Murry did not share her enthusiasm, and she struck up a secret correspondence with Orage, who had become Ouspensky’s ardent disciple.

On 30 January 1922 Mansfield and Ida left Switzerland for Paris, where Mansfield embarked on an expensive and unpleasant course of X-ray treatments with Manoukhin. In early February she wrote a deeply pessimistic story called ‘’, which is a chilling commentary on divine indifference and the tragedy of war. Mansfield approaches her theme through the story of a man, known simply as ‘the boss’, who drowns a fly in a pool of ink. She links the image of the fly to that of her dead brother and uses the struggles of the dying insect as a metaphor for human helplessness. The all-powerful figure of ‘the boss’ contains elements of Mansfield’s father and God. ‘The Fly’ first appeared in the in March 1922 and was included in 1923 in , when reviewers hailed it as ‘brilliant’. Its theme, which is open to many different interpretations, has been the subject of lively scholarly debate and the discovery that Chekhov had used very similar imagery in his story ‘Small Fry’ has raised questions on the originality of Mansfield’s subject matter.

On 22 February 1922 Mansfield’s third collection, , was published. It contained fifteen stories, including seven of those written at Isola Bella, five of those written for the , and ‘At the Bay’. It was an instant success and was reprinted in March, April and May. Reviews appeared in many of Britain’s major newspapers and periodicals, where Mansfield’s expanding literary range received favourable comment. In her review for the of 18 March 1922, Rebecca West remarked on the poetic qualities of ‘At the Bay’ and described Mansfield’s writing as being ‘the conquest of prose by the logic of poetry’. She also commented on Mansfield’s sharpened technique, noting that ‘her choice of the incident that will completely and economically prove her point is astonishing’.

Rebecca West, , Vol. 18, No. 466, 18 Mar 1922, p. 678.

The first American edition was published in May 1922 and was in its seventh reprint by the end of 1923.

Mansfield received a flood of congratulatory letters, but the literary success towards which she had struggled for so many years no longer seemed important to her. By now her chief preoccupation was her health. After three months of treatment in Paris, Mansfield left with Murry to spend the summer months in Switzerland. In July she wrote her last surviving story—a slight piece called ‘’—as a gift for Dorothy Brett who came to visit her. She quarrelled with Murry, who moved to another hotel, and they continued to live apart when they returned to London in August. Shortly after her arrival in London, Mansfield had a warm reunion with Orage, who encouraged her to attend the lectures of Ouspensky. A few weeks later Orage resigned as editor of the New Age and made arrangements to enter Gurdjieff’s recently established community at Fontainebleau. On 2 October, Mansfield left London for Paris, ostensibly for further treatment with Manoukhin, but she was aware of Orage’s plans and before her departure, she called on Ouspensky to obtain the address of Gurdjieff.

After two more weeks of treatment with Manoukhin, Mansfield was no better and was suffering alarming side effects from the X-rays, which made her doubt their efficacy. By 14 October, which was her thirty-fourth birthday, Mansfield had all but decided to follow Orage’s example and enter Gurdjieff’s community. Any remaining doubts were swept away by two members of the community, who visited her that day at her hotel. One of these was a well-established London psychiatrist named James Young, who gave a glowing description of life at Gurdjieff’s ‘Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man’. Two days later Mansfield set off, accompanied by Ida, on a preliminary visit to Fontainebleau, where she had her first encounter with Gurdjieff.

Gurdjieff was an exotic figure, whose flamboyant style was in sharp contrast to the serious and scholarly Ouspensky. Despite his Russianised name, he was of Greek Armenian extraction and his teaching was a blend of Eastern and Western philosophies with elements taken from Orthodox Christianity, Islamic Sufism, and Tibetan Buddhism. His community at Fontainebleau had some English adherents, but the majority of its members were Russians, many of whom were refugees from the Russian revolution. Among them were some talented painters, dancers, and composers to whom Mansfield was immediately attracted. When she met Gurdjieff, she asked him if she might join the community. Gurdjieff responded by allotting her a room on the first floor of the chateau in which the Institute was housed. After Mansfield’s death Gurdjieff was criticised for subjecting her to the primitive living conditions at the Institute, but since Mansfield was already critically ill when she entered the community, her stay there is not believed to have hastened her death.

Throughout her last months, Mansfield continued to correspond with Murry. On 9 January 1923 he arrived to stay at the Institute to celebrate the Russian New Year. He and Mansfield spent the afternoon and evening together and at about ten o’clock, when a performance of dancing by members of the community had finished, they set off upstairs to bed. Halfway up the stairs Mansfield was overcome by a fit of coughing, which prompted a violent lung haemorrhage. Two of the Institute’s doctors rushed to her assistance, but by half past ten she was dead. Three days later, on Friday 12 January, Mansfield’s funeral was held in the Protestant Church at Fontainebleau. It was attended by Murry, Ida, two of Mansfield’s sisters, and a few English friends. Gurdjieff was also present with some members of the Institute. Afterwards her body was buried at the nearby cemetery of Avon. Murry, however, forgot to pay for the funeral and her remains were removed by the authorities to a plot designated for paupers. When Harold heard of this in 1929, he arranged for her grave to be returned to the main cemetery where her gravestone can be seen to this day.

Mansfield’s early death, following so closely on her emergence as one of the most interesting new writers of her generation, provoked an outpouring of sympathetic coverage in the British and US Press. On 18 February 1923 devoted a full page to her life and work entitled ‘’. The following extract from the article, in which an attractive photograph of Mansfield featured prominently, reflects contemporary reactions to her death: ‘Katherine Mansfield was the greatest exponent of the art of the short story that England has yet produced, and was the peer of any short-story writer of our country . . . . Had she lived another ten years, it is likely that her name would be written in the history of English fiction beside the names of George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë.’

‘’ , , 18 Feb 1923, p.7.

In her will Mansfield left all her personal papers to Murry with instructions to publish as little as possible. Murry, however, immediately produced a stream of articles and publications drawn from the literary estate of his late wife. The collection, , appeared in June 1923 and contained twenty-one stories. Fifteen of them were unfinished, but some of Mansfield’s best work was also included, such as ‘The Doll’s House’ and ‘The Fly’. On 7 July 1923, The Doves’ Nest was reviewed in the by Raymond Mortimer who did not rank it as highly as Bliss or The Garden Party. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that ‘few writers have better described the unorganised flow of thoughts and feelings that continually move through the different layers of human consciousness’.

Raymond Mortimer, , Vol. 21, No. 534, 7 July 1923, pp. 394.

In November of the same year, Murry produced a volume of Mansfield’s poems and in August 1924, he published her fifth collection, . As the title suggests, many of the stories in this collection are Mansfield’s early work and had previously appeared in periodicals.

In 1927 public interest in Mansfield was further encouraged by the appearance of , carefully edited by Murry. This was followed in 1928 by in two volumes and by and in 1930. In 1933 Murry co-authored a biography with Ruth Elvish Mantz entitled which closes in 1912. In 1939 he produced .

As more of her writing was published, Mansfield’s admirers proliferated. Translations of her stories appeared in several countries, most notably in France, where the translation of her letters in 1931 and her journal in 1932 gave rise to a cult following. Murry’s editorial activities continued until shortly before his death in 1957, culminating in a fuller version of the letters in 1951 entitled , and a ‘Definitive Edition’ of the in 1954. The image, however, that he projected of a pure-minded and delicate artist was a pale and sanitised version of the real woman. Furthermore, his creation of a ‘legend’ and the volume of biographical material that he produced distracted critics from serious engagement with Mansfield’s work.

This shortfall was redressed in 1951 when Sylvia Berkman published , which still remains the best full-length critical study of Mansfield’s work. In her evaluation of Mansfield’s contribution to literature, which few scholars have challenged, Berkman states that while occupying a minor, historical position, Mansfield stands with James Joyce at ‘the head of the broad stream of development in the modern short story’.

[21] Sylvia Berkman, (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 197.

In 1953 Antony Alpers’ first book on Mansfield, , did much to correct Murry’s sugar-coated image and presented her personality with more honesty. This was followed during the 1960’s and 1970’s by several new approaches to her work, including three full-length critical studies and some substantial articles in literary journals. In 1980 Alpers’ earlier biography was superseded by his definitive work, , and in the years leading up to the 1988 centennial of Mansfield’s birth, further works of scholarship and biography were published.

By 1988 dozens of different collections of Mansfield’s stories had been published with translations in twenty-eight languages, including large numbers of works in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. The Mansfield Centennial was celebrated internationally with events in Wellington, Chicago, Belgium, France, and Germany and prompted the creation of dramatic adaptations of her work for theatre, film, and television. Between 1982 and 1996 editors Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott completed four of their five-volume , which comprise the fullest and most accurate versions of Mansfield’s letters to date. In 1997 Scott produced a meticulously revised version of Mansfield’s journal entries in two volumes, entitled .

Like many of her personal relationships, Mansfield’s relationship with her homeland has not always been straightforward. For several decades after her death she was classified as an English author whose affiliations lay with the London literary world. Her work had little in common with early New Zealand writing and until the 1950’s—with the exception of Arthur Sewell’s in 1936—she received only scant critical attention in New Zealand. After the publication of Berkman’s and Alpers’ books, perceptions of Mansfield changed, and the importance of her New Zealand identity became established. Moreover, in 1957 New Zealand scholars were encouraged to take a greater interest in her work by the New Zealand government’s purchase of the bulk of her personal papers for the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. Despite her many years as an expatriate, Mansfield is now universally recognised as a New Zealand writer, whose talent was deeply rooted in New Zealand where she located close to half of her stories.

As an individual Mansfield defies definition. She loved disguise and for much of her life, by her own admission, she concealed her inner self behind a series of ‘masks’. Because of her habit of adopting a new persona to suit the company in which she found herself, contemporary assessments of her character differ widely. The same problem arises with her letters in which she shows a different side of herself to each correspondent. Even in her personal notebooks, she remains elusive and her true nature is hard to identify. One of the most astute portraits of Mansfield comes from Leonard Woolf, who met her in 1917 and sums her up as follows: ‘By nature, I think, she was gay, cynical, amoral, ribald, witty. When we first knew her, she was extraordinarily amusing. I don’t think anyone has ever made me laugh more than she did in those days.’

Leonard Woolf, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), p. 204.

In the face of mortal illness Mansfield’s outlook changed dramatically. She bitterly regretted her ‘misspent youth’ and felt that after so many years of dissimulation, she had all but lost her own identity. Two weeks before her death, she wrote to Murry: ‘You see, my love, the question is always: “Who am I ?” . . . . if I were allowed one single cry to God, that cry would be: I want to be real.’

Letter to Murry of 26 December 1922.

Her last years were dominated by her struggles, largely for artistic reasons, to acquire greater personal honesty and integrity, and among her most admirable characteristics are the courage and commitment with which she pursued these high ideals. The success of her endeavours is demonstrated by the artistic quality of her mature work, which has ensured her an enduring place at the forefront of twentieth century short fiction.

Jean Devanny, 1894-1962 Carole Ferrier

In 1980, Keri Hulme commented upon the ‘intense sisterhood’ that she felt with ‘women like Jean Devanny.’ She saw her as ‘exploring things on the fringes that were very important to women way back then’, and considered it ‘very freeing (and very oppressive at the same time) to realise how completely these women were submerged’ (101). To be on the fringes in the early years of the twentieth century could indeed be simultaneously oppressive and freeing, and this is illustrated in complex ways in Devanny's fiction, which negotiates issues of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and class, working with but also problematising the relationship between the material conditions of life and a variety of sometimes clashing ideologies. The specificities of the New Zealand and Australian contexts in which she lived and worked also produced particular effects. But, despite vicissitudes, Jean Devanny remained far from submerged and kept on waving — not drowning — as I demonstrated extensively when in 1999, after twenty years of research, I published her biography (hereafter RR).

Devanny was born Jane Crook in 1894, the eighth of ten children, at Ferntown, a small sea-side settlement at the top of the South Island. She wrote in her autobiography (a version was posthumously published as , hereafter PD) that her maternal grandparents were from an upper-class background. This seems to have been a family legend, and the alleged colonel actually a sergeant, although it is true that he was involved in military operations in India and then the Maori Wars. The Crook family lived in the mining communities where her father, a boilermaker who had emigrated from England at around the age of 20, was employed. By the time Devanny left school at the age of 13 she had already changed her name from Jane to the Jean that her teacher preferred — it was this teacher along with her brothers who initially provided the books for the self-education she would pursue all her life. At the age of 17, when the family had moved to Puponga, she married a miner, Hal Devanny, and he found work in several other mining settlements, including Fairfield near Dunedin, before they settled in Wellington at the beginning of the 1920s with their two children, a third having died in infancy. In 1929 the family emigrated to Australia. Devanny joined the Communist Party in Sydney in 1930, and was soon put in charge of building one of its front organisations, the Workers' International Relief. In this capacity she was sent for several months to Berlin and the Soviet Union in 1931. She separated from Hal soon after her return and throughout the 1930s had a close liaison with the leader of the Australian Communist Party, J. B. Miles. From the middle of that decade she spent increasing amounts of time in north Queensland whose sugar cane country and coral reefs became the setting of much of her later fiction and travel writing. In 1950, following a reconciliation with Hal, she moved to Townsville in north Queensland, and lived there until her death in 1962.

Devanny's first attempt at extended writing was non-fictional theorising of gender and race. Her ‘’ is a kind of precursor to Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 , and she also produced another manuscript called ‘.’ None of this sociological — or sexological — work aiming at a ‘scientific’ approach was ever published in book form, and she doesn’t say from where the impetus came for this type of writing. Critical commentary on the condition of women published in polemical letters between 1916 and 1919 in the was ‘derided’ by the tutor of the Marxist study group in the Puponga mining community; it was, like her piano playing, ‘a petty bourgeois trait to be despised’ (PD, 67). But Devanny saw such work as informed by historical materialism — ‘as interesting to me as a great novel’ and as ‘romance at its sublimest: the masterly clarification of all the involved and hitherto mysterious processes of social evolution!’ (PD, 96). And George Winter, Secretary-General of the Communist Party of New Zealand in the early 1920s, shared her interest in anthropological writing when she met him in Wellington, and encouraged her forays into social science before he left for Sydney.

Devanny’s development as a writer of fiction goes through several phases: novels of the New Woman, leavened with class and race; novels about class, leavened with sexual politics and ethnicity; novels about history, leavened with class, race and ethnicity, and gender. As in D. H. Lawrence's fiction, sexuality is a central feature of her plots. Devanny published some fourteen novels and a book of short stories; several other novels remain unpublished. She had a lucky break with an acceptance by the London publishers Duckworth early on, and the reception of her work was very good for a period. Later, changing public taste, and changes in her choices of subject matter and her sense of her audience, made her work less successful.

Devanny’s earlier fiction set in New Zealand and published in the 1920s and early 1930s is mainly romances of the New Woman; her later writing in Australia shifted to socialist realism with in 1936, and then to historical fiction with in 1949. Heroines in search of sexual liberation recur in the ten novels published prior to Sugar Heaven. Many of them read what is called in ‘the frankest kind of fiction’, and this gives them sexual knowledge held up as what often characterises the ‘newness’ of New Women. This turning of a dispassionate eye upon the social value and construction of sex and sexuality is frequently commented upon as an excess of ‘knowledge’ in the reviewing reception of her novels in Britain and Australasia. Devanny’s fictional contribution to the discussion at this time of the issues of birth control, sexual desire, marriage and the status of women is substantial and distinctive, as Nicole Moore has argued, in its refusal to concede the liberating plots of sexuality only to white, middle-class women.

Devanny had begun to write fiction when she arrived in Wellington in 1921. ‘Story after story I turned out, but only a few were sold,’ she recalled, later describing her early ones as ‘too Harrisian' in a 1937 letter to Lily Turner (an agent with Federated Press in New York). A writing career was a difficult undertaking. ‘My first book was a long time in the making. I wrote it in fits and starts. Deep down the proposition seemed chimerical and pretentious’ (RR, 31). It was Jack MacDonald, an organiser for the Socialist Party of Canada, visiting in 1921-2, who encouraged her to embark upon a novel. She established ‘a close intellectual bond’ with him, and ‘the luxury of our talks together satisfied in me, for the first time in my life, a deep need’ (RR, 31ff), she wrote. The main characters of the short story ‘,’ Rosa and Jack, may well be based upon Devanny and MacDonald, and other of the stories collected in feature left-wing activists.

Onerous physical labour was part of the writer’s lot in the early twentieth century. When her first story was accepted in the mid-1920s, Devanny was advised to buy a typewriter, and acquired one of ‘the old fashioned kind in which the roller is masked ... I had to lift the cover every two or three words to see how I was going.’ She recalled, however, that ‘in time, using the two middle fingers only, I became faster than the average touch typist’ (RR, 31). As a working class woman who rarely had any money, the habitual difficulties for an artist, and a woman artist were compounded for her. Karl and Patricia had not reached their teens in 1921 when Devanny moved to Wellington and began to write fiction. In order to practice the piano, she had earlier fastened her eldest child to the hills hoist: ‘I got the notion of tying Karl up by long sliding ropes to the clothes-line and, in explaining my reasons for this, my desire for uninterrupted practice, my visitors saw the point’ (PD, 67). Zora Cross, reputed according to Michael Sharkey to have installed her own children in tea chests while she worked, interviewed Devanny in Sydney in July 1930, and faithfully relayed a reassuring self-construction for the readers of the :

her amazing literary story ... should be an inspiration to every woman who wants to write, for Jean Devanny did her woman’s work, married and mothered and reared her family before she took up her pen.

Eve Langley's unpublished manuscript novels (`, `', `', `' and the unfinished `'), discussed in detail by Robyn Colwill, recount the masculinism and repressive familial ideologies that prevailed even in urban leftist artistic circles in the 1920s and 1930s, in this case in Auckland, and presented considerable barriers to the emergence of the woman writer.

Shearers and miners were key among militant groupings of workers in New Zealand at this time, and two of Devanny’s first three novels are set among them. is situated in the mining working class; deals with the middle-class squattocracy and the shearers who work for them; is located in an urban setting of largely declassed professionals and middle-class Maori, moving in semi-bohemian circles in the New Zealand capital.

I have never been able to establish whether the novel Devanny actually wrote first was The Butcher Shop or Lenore Divine, both published in 1926, or Dawn Beloved which came out in 1928. When the first (whichever it was) was finished, she had no idea of how to get it published, but sent it off to Robert Gibbings who, happily for her, forwarded it on to the English publisher Duckworth. They did not take it at the time but told her they would consider further manuscripts. When she submitted The Butcher Shop, it was accepted, and appeared closely followed by Lenore Divine. She then revised Dawn Beloved which they published in 1928.

Devanny told the journalist, later novelist, Nelle Scanlan that, when her first novel came out, she chose the title The Butcher Shop ‘because the woman is butchered in life.’ She conceptualised the problem novel at this stage in this way: ‘Other writers have attacked this subject, but usually they chose a women who is childless. That problem is simple. It is where there are children that the real problem arises.’ Later, she would describe her initial attempt as ‘terribly confused and foolish,’ but she was quite isolated and had no Engels to correspond with, as did Minna Kautsky, about the difficulties of producing the tendenzroman. Duckworth would not allow her to be too didactic — or perhaps too political — and had edited out two concluding chapters. Devanny told Scanlan that ‘shorn of the explanatory philosophy deleted from the end ... it does not achieve my real purpose.’

In the year that was banned, Devanny published her version of . (I have not found any mention of her having read Lawrence before she discussed him with Katherine Susannah Prichard when she passed through Perth on the boat, other than that one of her stories was published alongside his in (PD, 84), but have discussed both writers’ view of him in Duwell.) (1928) is a novel of a young artistic person growing up in a mining community with a drunkard miner father and a mother with few resources other than her piano. read it as mainly about class, and considered it important in being ‘the first attempt to depict in fiction form the home life of the West Coast miner and to analyse the reasons for his communistic tendencies.’ found the character of Val Devoy, the young miner (who has more resemblances to Hal than simply a name that recalls his), ‘boorish, entirely self-centred, chaste and cold, and of great physical beauty — a man who can love a woman but make her life a torment by his lack of consideration.’ Val, the husband who is loved but not desired, is conveniently disposed of by a plot device, and Dawn escapes to a disinterested protector in Fuller who, she believes, ‘likes me well enough to be prepared to release me from slavish housework in order to develop my ideas and find if they bear fruit’ (294). She asserts of Fuller and Val:

I shall not allow either of those men to dominate my life ... I am bigger than they are.... Am I to live in ugliness all my days when roses are springing at my feet? Don’t you think I have the right to gather up the sunbeams that fall around my door?

Dawn begins to ‘spy tentatively between the pages of Val’s sociological works’ — and gets interested in working class philosophies. She tells Mrs Taylor:

‘After baby is born I’ll study this socialism.’

‘Won’t do you any good,’ advised the other. ‘Only make you discontented.’

Fuller who, according to Dawn's bookish brother Ralph, ‘takes his opinions of [socialism] from the capitalist press’ believes that socialist theory will be dangerous for Dawn because she is ‘the stuff of which martyrs are made.’ Such ideas as ‘did the future hold nothing but tiny kitchens and brutish environments for these people?’ could, he considers, be dynamite in her hands. ‘Years afterwards,’ we are told, Dawn argues on lecture platforms that ‘passion ... must be more a cultivated attribute than a primitive instinct.’ Intellectual fulfilment and expansion were to be found through the ideas in radical literature for early socialists in remote regions such as those in which Dawn — and Jean — spent their earlier years.

A group of novels set in Wellington (a comparatively larger, freer, and more anonymous environment) followed: , (in part) and . With Riven (1929), the focus shifts from younger New Women to the mothers to whom it is dedicated, who are also in need of liberation. To some extent, the novel can be read as a call to reject maternalist morality. The divide between the mother, Marigold, and Justine and Fay, her sister-in-law and daughter is to some extent bridged by the transformation of Marigold. Marigold tells Justine that it is habitual to go ‘about our silly business in the calm and crouching in fear from the floods; instead of rising in our united strength and using our brains to battle with them.’ Supported in the right way by older people, ‘youth would be such an army of gloriously adjusted men and women as would shame to death all the creeping hobgoblins of a selfish and outgrown propriety.’ In that situation, the ‘greatest of all the slogans would be: “The experience of the old at the service of the young”’. Riven was reviewed, in the of July 1930, as a book whose author

characterises, dissects and analyses with an almost surgical knife the changing views and outlook of today on what is the most important question in our racial and social life, Love and Marriage. Jean Devanny will cause some of her readers to furiously think and others to condemn, many more will applaud and agree.

Devil Made Saint was also published in 1930; ‘a gloomy though powerful story of temperament and genius ... a harsh repelling story, but written with strength and insight,’ was how greeted it.

Bushman Burke (1930) is part cosmopolitan, part bush. Taipo Burke, the conservative but ‘good-hearted’ bushman, is smitten by the exotic Flo, who reads frank fiction, drinks cocktails and jazzes. This produces many conflicts after their marriage when he retreats to the bush and Flo follows. The novel revolves around a triangle that bears some similarities to that of Red Burke, Tessa and Deb in Katharine Susannah Prichard’s (1926). Flo, the urban New Woman, vies with Mary, the country schoolteacher, for Taipo, but it is the exotic woman that gets her man, unlike the scenario of Prichard’s text. The novel embodies an interesting conflict between middle-class feminist New Woman ideology and the morality and knowledge of working-class women that Devanny in many respects validates in other novels. At one point, Taipo is unwillingly drawn into a discussion of birth control with Flo, and comments that he is surprised that she has such knowledge, admonishing her, ‘The girls in my world don’t’. Flo retorts, ‘for goodness sake try and realise that you can’t judge us by the standards of working class women.’ New Zealand cultural commentators were not given to depicting their culture as crude. While Bushman Burke, when it appeared in May 1930, was dismissively summarised in All About Books as involving a ‘temperamental tug of war between the “cave man” hero and the cocktail drinking heroine, which forms the gist of the novel, ending in victory for the cave man’. Isabel Maud Cluett wrote of the novel and the author: ‘Bushman Burke may be said to be a riotous “saga of sex” ... although her stories all have a New Zealand background, and her descriptive scenes ring true enough, the dramas she unfolds have very small relation to New Zealand life, its conditions and traditions’ (10).

In August 1929, when Devanny set sail for Sydney, her intention was to continue on to Britain where she seemed to have established a market for her fiction. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Tasman Sea was seen as not much more of a barrier than the state boundary between New South Wales and Victoria. There was a probability that New Zealand would federate, and the notion of Australasia was quite widely accepted. That federation did not happen has been seen as contributing to a persisting degree of insularity in New Zealand. Even at the end of the 1950s, Karl Stead considered that a ‘tension exists somewhere in the mind of every New Zealander between “here” and “there”... staying and leaving’, and that ‘what I think the Australians call “the cultural cringe”’ had lingered’. Stead invoked the ‘isolation from experience’ produced by ‘a combination of remoteness and insignificance’, compounded by ‘the thinness and uniformity of its society, its dependence on Europe and America, and a certain sourness that underlies its achievements’ (246-7). Historically, the lack of cultural interaction between New Zealand and Australia in the twentieth century has been pronounced, and differences between the two societies remain substantial. For Barbara Petrie, ‘the geographical isolation is not as important as the cultural’ and when this intersects with ‘the fear of looking in the mirror of the other’, it contributes to the relative paucity of cultural exchange with Australia (xxi). Rosie Scott, who also moved across the Tasman to live in Sydney, fifty years after Devanny, commented that even at the end of the twentieth century it was still the case that Australians and New Zealanders did not read widely in each other’s literature: ‘the books are not nearly looked at enough by either side' (43). Simon During had a different take again on this in 1985:

In those postcolonial countries which have no effective postcolonised discourse one finds a crisis of emptiness. This is true of Australia in particular. It has never been sufficiently recognised that New Zealand has a different, and more complex discursive community than Australia because the postcolonised/ postcolonising forces are balanced here as they are not there … there is no strong postcolonised discourse by which they can mirror themselves to themselves. (371)

Scott similarly suggests that ‘Maori culture has imbued Pakeha culture in a much more meaningful and obvious way’ (42), in comparison to Indigenous culture in white Australia. Soon after her arrival in Sydney at the end of the 1920s, Devanny commented upon what struck her as a pervasive Australian racism and ethnocentrism. In her earlier novels there are many portraits of Maori characters, some are even marriage prospects for the white heroines, although it has to be said that this is not a usual occurrence in New Zealand fiction of the time. As Mary Paul points out in relation to Mander’s (1920), ‘two of Mander’s siblings married local Maori. But it is interesting that the novel does not include such a plot line’ (87). White nervousness about miscegenation is foregrounded in Devanny's short story ‘’ (1926). Annie Salgast has her first child in the isolated Golden Ridge mining settlement and, despite her parents and her husband Bob’s being believed to be of ‘English’ ancestry, has to agree that the baby looks like ‘a Maori; a regular Maori’ (31). Bob resolves to kill the only Maori man in the settlement, Tane Wetane, but then discovers from Tane that he is in fact Tane’s cousin: ‘Everyone knows around the pah. You think you’re English, but your people only adopted you — a little baby’ (39). Tane had not been able to tell him this since, he tells Bob, he had realised ‘you don’t like Maoris; I heard you call them bloody niggers, so I shut up’ (39). A further twist occurs at the end of the story when Bob’s friend, the mine manager Ashley Fletcher, goes to give Mrs Salgast the good news that ‘The baby is Bob’s after all’, to which she replies, ‘Oh, Ashes, I thought it was you’ (40).

In The Butcher Shop, the immigrant, Miette, is criticised by the narrating voice as having ‘English ideas about “coloured” people’ and as needing ‘to learn that the Maori, grand in the traditions of his race, stood equal with the average white man, and that in New Zealand, racial distinction between Hawaiki's sons and the whites was non-existent’ in relation to her affair with Jimmy, son of Chief Tutaki. Dominant ideologies were of course not as progressive as this. Lenore Divine depicts middle-class Maori characters in Wellington, Ngaire Ngatoro and her brother Kowhatu, and a white heroine Lenore who, although she does not know many Maori, sleeps in the same bed as Ngaire, secretary to a Cabinet Minister. Their family, like that of Jimmy Tutaki, are aristocratic Maori, retaining aspects of their culture but highly educated within the dominant system. They mix with other middle class Maori, including the MP Noho Toki but, unlike him, vote Labour.

At home and abroad, Devanny appeared, as All About Books suggested in June 1930, ‘something of an “exotic” in the field of New Zealand literature’. Reviewers, largely in Britain at this stage given the undeveloped public literary sphere in Australasia, were ambivalent about Devanny's first fiction. ‘Both weak and strong, artistically and emotionally’ was how the review described Jean's earlier writing. Discussing The Butcher Shop, Jean reportedly told Nelle Scanlan that women were butchered in life ‘with a fierce intensity, her luminous eyes shining, but with no trace of sordid pleasure in her discovery. People may question her talent or taste. But no one can doubt her sincerity.’ Candour and frankness about the sexual standing of women are represented as key concerns. Devanny’s later opinion of her first-published novel was not high; she saw ‘its meagre merit’ as ‘sincerity, frankness and a certain power of phrasing.’ Many of the 1926 reviews of The Butcher Shop, while ambivalent about the ‘crude slabs of distasteful sex stuff,’ were nonetheless favourable. The even went so far as to suggest: ‘With one or two possible exceptions, this book marks the largest stride yet made by an English writer of fiction towards that absolute liberty of thought and expression possessed and exercised by the novelist of France,’ and that what it might embody of French naturalism as opposed to a more restrained or even repressed English tradition was not unwelcome. The lead-up to the banning in New Zealand in 1926, discussed in detail by Bill Pearson, was that the Prime Minister’s secretary received a cable on 1 March urging a ‘watch for new novel’ that had ‘alleged depiction station life New Zealand disgusting indecent communistic’ (226). By 26 April, the Censorship Appeal Board (which operated very covertly) had determined that it was ‘sordid, unwholesome and unclean ... it should be banned.’ This decision was not announced, but the and the reported it in early May, and Seton Crisp in the of 3 June 1926, commenting that it was ‘crude enough’ but had ‘sincerity and a certain grim strength.’ Jane Mander had communicated her concerns to Crisp about the novel’s likely reception. While Devanny never mentions any contact with — or even any reading of — Mander or Robin Hyde, we know that they took some interest in her literary fortunes. Later, in an article in in 1936, Hyde described The Butcher Shop as `written with great if undisciplined power ... a work of crude ore' (5).

In another interview, ‘Banned by the Censors’, Devanny discussed the suppression of The Butcher Shop. ‘Probably the book was banned because of its brutality, but that cannot be helped, for it is a true story of New Zealand country life.... I have lived in the country and seen for myself.’ Since no grounds were officially detailed, the basis of the banning has never been entirely clear. ‘It is possible the reason is that it would have been a bad advertisement for New Zealand.’ She suggests, however, that its suppression might have been counter-productive: ‘the censors here have given the book the best advertisement it could have’ (RR, 39ff). The novel was not prohibited in Australia until after her arrival, and so achieved some readership there.

's reception was less glowing. Its content was seen as unbalanced, with too much ‘morbid’ psychology and not enough public life: `It would be a much better book if it gave us more New Zealand and less psychology. As it is, we have too many English authors already writing this morbid stuff to feel in urgent need of any imported goods of the same description, especially damaged goods', opined Edwin Pugh in the Bookman of December 1926. The opposition constructed between New Zealand and psychology is of interest here. Lenore Divine is being received as an ‘exotic’ Dominion novel and thus not expected to be about interiority or the subjective dilemmas of the New Woman, but about far away places and their social dilemmas: ‘And the pity of it is that in the concluding chapters her psychology goes all to pieces. We don’t believe in this easy swift solution of the difficulties in which she has involved her story.’ This is, one might recall, the country that has a conspicuous consistent history of incarceration of its women writers in mental hospitals. That the `solution' involves the heroine marrying a Maori may well be another significant unstated problem of the agenda here; the review of 21 October 1926 warned: ‘The doctrine which she attempts to inculcate is new and bewildering; indeed its utter unconventionality would necessitate a complete revolution of the present social system. One fails, too, to see how her free-love ideals would improve matters, or how the inter-marriage of white and brown races would further the interests of civilisation.’

The book of short stories, , appeared in 1927. Papers in Scotland seem to have taken a particular reviewing interest, perhaps because of the high proportion of Scots among New Zealand settlers. , under the heading ‘,’ wrote:

These New Zealand stories are not pleasant reading, for they probe the depths of passion; but they are written with a sincerity so absolute that one cannot turn away from them even when they shock and scarify sensibilities.

The viewed the stories as extending Devanny’s move towards ‘absolute liberty of thought’:

Invariably the characters selected are the people of our Dominions, where life in the great lonely places is in strong contrast to the habits and morals of the civilised world; people whose reason melts before rougher instinct and passion.... Throughout, the writer disdains the theorists and presents only the truth, and, understanding the primitive moods of full-blooded men and women, she does not shrink from disclosing the harder facts of life as she knows it. (RR, 40ff).

Devanny is being taken up here in the tradition of what has been called the Empire romance novel. The term ‘best-seller’ came into common usage after the First World War, and the Leavisite critique (as in Queenie Leavis’ , 1932) was a response to a growing phenomenon. Apart from the ‘sex novel’ common in the 1920s, the ‘Empire romance’ had many devotees along with the ‘desert-love’ novel. Elinor Glynn was particularly popular. But Devanny's developing fiction did not quite fit into any of the categories. In the reviews, a few key terms begin repeatedly to recur; ‘sincerity’ and truth to (colonial) life (of instinct and passion) are achieved, but ‘the raw,’ the ‘brutal’ and ‘the unpleasant’ are too much in evidence. ‘She manifests little scruple,’ wrote the reviewer, ‘in dealing with relations of the sexes as displayed in the wilder communities of New Zealand; but if she could get away from the subject now and again we should rate her real liberty of thought much higher than this book warrants.’ The described her writing as ‘verbose studies in desire.’ The found most of the stories ‘too richly flavoured with the ardours of sex, with love as a violent passion rather than a tender one’; when she tried to evoke tenderness (as in ‘’), it was ‘over-sentimentalised.’ The reviews also increasingly show a debate about the quality of Devanny’s writing. Old Savage, the asserted: ‘would have more literary value if the authoress’s own style did not partake somewhat of the men and women of her observation — crude and raw at times.’ Other reviews talked of ‘a volume of exceptional quality,’ and of the stories as ‘masterpieces of their kind’; suggested that ‘the name of Jean Devanny, already important, acquires additional significance through the fine craft and mordant character of Old Savage’ (RR, 40ff).

Throughout her life Devanny, described by her daughter Pat in her Epilogue to Point of Departure as ‘a woman forged in her particular circumstances, a politico beyond changing’ (319), would struggle with how to prioritise politics and literature — both in terms of the time allocated to either, and in terms of how her fiction could or should engage with politics. The Butcher Shop shows an uncomfortable melding of didactic intent (an early form of what would now be called materialist feminism) and experimentation with the generic conventions of the romance. The analysis of the woman question and of racial difference that Devanny embarked upon in her early non-fictional work is embodied and further worked out through her career of fictional production. The distinctive quality of Devanny's fiction lies in the centrality of its engagement with a committed writing that included sexual politics as well as what was then conventionally called ‘politics’. She said of The Butcher Shop in a 1926 interview with Nelle Scanlan: ‘a good deal of the opposition to the book might be political. I cannot disassociate my writing from my Socialistic views, and the book was written with a purpose.’ In Australia in the early 1930s, Devanny was mixing in circles where there was much discussion of art as a weapon and, in an essay in the early 1940s, ‘', she described her as ‘the first really proletarian novel in Australia’. When she moved towards historical fiction, probably influenced by her friends in Australia, Eleanor Dark, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw, only the first of a planned three novels on the development of the sugar industry was published, and she was far less successful in this genre than they were, possibly because of her desire to make the politics of history more fully explicit.

In terms of literary influences on Devanny's developing craft, little is known of her earlier reading. She mentions as early key influences ‘Conrad, Hergesheimer and, above all, Galsworthy’, as well as Melville’s , which produced ‘sheer palpitating wonder in reading.’ The only woman writer Devanny mentions as any kind of early influence is ‘the exquisite adored’ Katherine Mansfield. A comment made by Mansfield in her Journal had particularly struck her: ‘All that I write, all that I am, is on the border of the sea. It’s a kind of playing. I want to put all my force behind it but somehow I cannot’ (PD, 82), and she referred to it in ‘two long lectures on the relationship between literature and society’, delivered in Christchurch, claiming that the ban on The Butcher Shop had stimulated her into writing. Mansfield’s fiction, largely set in the 1890s, was published as Devanny was beginning to think of writing fiction; she mentions reading ‘’ and ‘', and her use of the farouche outsider figure may draw upon the fondness of Mansfield, as well as Lawrence, for the traveller who offers freedom. In relation to local models, then, Devanny could find ‘something different, close to me, of my own’ in reading Mansfield. As well, as Gibbons suggests, the expatriate Mansfield could be for her contemporaries in New Zealand ‘a symbol of the promise which could be fulfilled in the old world’. But it is also interesting to speculate whether Devanny encountered any of the New Zealand suffrage and temperance novels of the 1890s and 1900s. Titles such as Edith Searle Grossmann’s (1893) and (1910) or Louisa Baker’s (1894) and (1898) share a marked similarity of tone with Devanny’s early fiction — a high-minded feminism, a strong political impetus, a tendency towards purple prose.

The dramatists Ibsen and Shaw can be identified as some of the strongest influences upon many of the themes of Devanny’s earlier fiction. Lenore Divine mentions what advanced young women of the time might be familiar with — Galsworthy’s along with Ibsen. ‘“Have you read Ibsen’s Ghosts, Kowhatu?”’ Lenore asks her future husband, ‘“there is mention in it of a man who was worm-eaten from his birth. Poor Holly, also, is only the victim of the weakness of his progenitors. Like breeds like, dear. You are strong because you come of a strong race, and –’’’. One of Devanny’s first published stories, in the early 1920s in the , was ‘.’ Its main protagonist, like her own father and many of her subsequent characters, is a victim of alcoholism, a ‘vice ... which unremitting heredity had fastened on him.’ His wife Eily is on the point of leaving, when she chances to read a letter from his mother condemning her for failing, through laziness, to save him from ‘this curse, which passes so lightly over the heads of the mentally brutal [but] fastens with an octopus-like grip on the brightest and most beautiful of minds!’ Devanny's interest in eugenics was expressed in several articles written soon after arriving in Sydney. Back in 1916, anticipating the social consequences of the carnage of World War One, Marion Piddington had proposed in a short story, ‘’ (written under the pseudonym of Lois), that artificial insemination might be employed to maintain the race through `scientific or eugenic' babies. Influenced by race suicide ideology she also published articles in the early 1930s advocating sterilisation of the ‘unfit’. Devanny's interest in the topic of eugenics had been developed in New Zealand and was encouraged by Piddington when she met her in Sydney. Most of the ideas of the eugenicists sit oddly with a liberatory socialism, and it is probably not to be regretted that in early 1930, Devanny could not find a publisher for ‘a short work on Eugenic Reform’ for ‘the layman and woman’, given the content of several articles she did get published on the topic in . Piddington was Dowell O'Reilly's sister and, hence, the aunt of Eleanor Dark, and involved Devanny in her pioneering work around birth control, lecturing and setting up the first clinic in Australia in Sydney.

Devanny was a figure of some interest and controversy for her female literary contemporaries when she arrived in Sydney. Many of Hal and Jean’s close friends in New Zealand, such as Paddy Webb, Bob Semple and Harry Holland had been on the far left of the New Zealand Labour Party and she had contacts around the Labour Party in Sydney. She also went to some of the gatherings organised by Dulcie Deamer, the ‘Queen of Bohemia’, originally from Christchurch, who had been in Sydney since the early 1920s and was on the executive of the newly-formed Fellowship of Australian Writers. Edna Ryan, then in the Communist Party, recalled that Devanny ‘arrived to meet a group of a dozen, even twenty or so women all of whom would have welcomed her. She came here of course as an author, and they had a lot more prestige then than they do now.’ But Devanny found that she did not really fit in at the bohemian Saturday lunches at the Café Roma.

On the other hand, Jessie Mackay, described in Macdonald et al.’s as ‘the first New Zealand woman poet to achieve fame at home and abroad,’ and a feminist, wrote to Mary Gilmore in 1929: ‘O that woman! Why should she ever have heard of me? All I’ve heard of her is that she goes around the country lecturing on companionate marriage, and her Butcher’s Shop was banned for its morals or lack of them. Did she get as far as Sydney — and did she give herself out as true-blue NZ? No matter.’ Other of Devanny's female Australasian contemporaries remained unimpressed with what she sought to divulge about the sexual politics of the time. Mary Fullerton agreed in a letter to Miles Franklin in 1929 that Devanny was ‘no doubt sincere, but ... puts too much that is gross in her report of life.’ In particular she objected to a scene involving the oral castration of lambs in The Butcher Shop.

In March 1930, Miles Franklin on a visit back to Australia noticed Devanny at the Mitchell Library, and wrote to Fullerton about how impressive and striking she looked. Fullerton was quick to reply that it might be unwise to see Devanny as aristocratic:

I’m amazed, it just shows how looks mislead sometimes for she writes like a butcher’s wench and I say that not merely because she has written a book called The Butcher’s Shop but because of her outlook on human character and life. Common.

Compared to ‘that dear little GB Lancaster’ Devanny was consistently excessive, in Fullerton’s view, and ‘in straining to be red blooded masculine, she only manages to be raw meat’ (RR, 60ff). Franklin nonetheless remained a supporter of Devanny. She would write to Alice Henry in 1935:

Jean Devanny is a New Zealander, a red revolutionist and ranter, but I like her very much. I read her Butcher’s Shop. She tries to ape the overseas advanced stuff which gives her work a strained effect — too yeasty. Shows lack of education and lack of natural depth that wd not be apparent if she wd be quieter.

Despite this, a close friendship, conducted through letters and a few visits, developed between Franklin and Devanny through the 1940s and, when the latter was working on her Autobiography, Franklin encouraged and advised her, as the correspondence published in Ferrier ed. shows.

Soon after arriving in Sydney, the family being short of money, Devany hit upon the idea of going out bush to work as a domestic. She only lasted there for a few months, but was able to describe as drawing upon Australian experiences of working in the bush, although this may originally have been drafted as a New Zealand novel. In her first attempt to establish herself with an Australian publisher, she suggested in 1930 to Angus and Robertson that it might be marketed as `first Australian novel of Jean Devanny, author of The Butcher Shop: Love and Mystery on a Western sheep station.' The Reader’s Report, however, suggested that Jean’s publicity proposals would produce ‘caustic criticism’ for ‘both publishers and author’ since the novel was ‘no more Australian than Devanny is.’ While the novel was ‘melodramatic to a degree and reeking with sex — two selling points nowadays’, the report's author was definite that ‘One cannot imagine a more un-Australian lot of characters’ (RR, 65ff). Read earlier as un-New Zealand, Devanny now found herself un-Australian as well. Worse, her empire romances were becoming less attractive to Duckworth who ‘on account of an anti-religious bias pervading its main theme' considered , another novel of the bush, and the first set in Australia, ‘unsuitable for publication in England.’ It did, however, come out in New York in 1934.

In March 1932, , which had been completed on the boat to Europe, was threatened with being banned. In the event it was not. Devanny may well have been unaware that the opinion of Customs that it focussed upon ‘the life of a woman who has very little moral fibre’ and was not ‘a book one would like to have in the house’, nearly resulted in proceedings against it. The reception of Devanny’s work in mainstream reviewing channels was also beginning to become more negative. Poor Swine comes over as a rather more cynical reworking of a similar plotline to that of Dawn Beloved; it was not appreciated by the reviewer of All About Books 14 June 1932, who complained that Devanny was

attempting to hold her public by clever ‘modern’ portrayals of dissolute characters. It is the same old creed — environment, heredity, circumstance, personal charm and attributes are all made the excuse for the main character to trample selfishly and dishonourably over every despised convention and ethics … by definitely appealing for the reader’s sympathy, the author hoists a banner of conscienceless ‘freedom’ that may be waved whenever an excusing circumstance may be found. (RR, 102ff)

While in Wellington, Devanny had been closely involved with far left circles but had not joined either of the two Communist Party groupings that existed there in the mid-1920s. The official one, led by the Griffin brothers and Gordon Kilpatrick, of about 10-16 members, was `very puritanical' and, as Bert Roth, the Auckland labour historian, personally told me, condemned the other on the grounds that they ‘went to dances, drank, and slept with each other.’ Jean and Hal were associated with the wilder group. Later, trying to remember this part of the past for her Autobiography, Jean recalled it as ‘a montage of street corner meetings, hall meetings, social gatherings, of street collections and work on behalf of the unemployed.’

It was not until Devanny had been in Sydney for a while that she joined the Communist Party — against the advice of Marion Piddington, who told her `You are not tough enough for them', and who even offered Jean her cottage in the Blue Mountains as a writer’s retreat. But despite Devanny's commitment to the importance of literature — asserted for example in her 1930 article that compared ‘true literary thought’ to ‘pillars of fire guarding and guiding the line of humanity’s progress’ — she didn't opt, as did Eleanor Dark, for a comparatively quiet life in the country. Despite the resultant lack of time for writing, she hurled herself into the struggles of the Depression and was much in demand as an agitational public speaker. ‘I was assigned to numberless tasks, but most of all to platform and “soapbox” work’, she recalled (PD, 130).

Devanny nevertheless completed two more novels at this time, and . ‘Though I had ceased to regard fiction writing as of any importance, there was still the necessity to earn some money,’ she commented. The Virtuous Courtesan is a significant novel, despite being produced when time was at a premium, for its picture of Sydney bohemia and in being one of the very first Australasian novels to draw lesbian and homosexual characters. Published in the United States in 1935, it was speedily banned in Australia.

In the mid-1930s, Devanny made a turn to the ‘industrial novel’ and to ‘reportage.’ She had been spending time in Mt Isa and north Queensland, after travelling there initially on speaking tours for the Movement Against War and Fascism, doing organisational political work in relation to the impending Spanish Civil War. North Queensland was at this period known as the Red North, with large numbers of socialists among the workers in the sugar and other industries. Many were European migrants, a number of whom, as Nettie Palmer would document, went to Spain. Sugar Heaven was the first of Devanny’s sugar industry novels, and was based upon the major cane-cutters’ strikes over the plague-like Weil’s Disease in the mid-1930s. Devanny’s next sugar novel was (1938) which, like Sugar Heaven, is interested in ethnicity, and in the NESB Migrant population as an exploited group subject to discrimination. A Lawrencean vitalism is found in the figure of Muranivich in Paradise Flow, whose complexity is prefigured in the assertion in Sugar Heaven that Slavs, like Chinese, give an impression of coming from a more mature cultural background than Anglo-Australians. Again, before much more recent assessments of figures such as Francis Adams by writers including Meg Tasker, Devanny is picking up on much more complicated understandings. Amelia Batistich’s fiction of the 1940s about Dalmatian gum diggers in New Zealand would engage with similar communities.

Devanny planned a historical trilogy of the development of the sugar industry but only two volumes were completed and only one ever published, in 1949. This deals largely with the time of indentured labour of South Sea Islanders, from the 1860s when Queensland was regarded potentially as a second Louisiana following the end of slavery in the United States, until, with Federation at the turn of the century, most ‘Kanakas’ were forcibly repatriated. Cindie is also interested in the position of the Indigenous people, but most of the writing Devanny did in this regard was non-fiction, in travel books and articles. Despite her writing back to Working Bullocks, as noted above; for whatever reasons, Prichard's and goldfields novels did not inspire her to a similar endeavour of making Aboriginal characters central and prominent in her work. The only substantial Australian Indigenous characters she creates are the Torres Strait Islanders in her novel , which remains unpublished.

Devanny's earlier great success in publishing with Duckworth was not maintained. Through the 1950s until her death in Townsville in 1962 she managed to publish almost nothing further, for a complex range of reasons including a Cold War climate very oppressive for socialist women. Also of relevance here was her lack of favour in the Australasian Book Society, controlled by the Communist Party.

It is interesting to consider how Devanny's literary career might have been different had she remained in New Zealand: whether she would have had a substantial impact upon the development of New Zealand political and literary life, or whether she would have been stifled in various ways. She flirted with the idea of returning there in the 1950s, but never did. Robin Hyde suggested, in her Foreword to (published not long before she died in London in her early thirties) that the birds symbolised ‘our youth, our best, our intelligent, our brave and beautiful [who] must make the long migration, under a compulsion they can hardly understand, or else be dissatisfied all their lives long.’ Devanny did not expect her migration to take her merely across the Tasman but, apart from one visit to Europe on political business, that is how it turned out. Her migration away from a culture that was repressive and restrictive for the person and writer she was and aspired to be did not take her as far as she might have wished. But her analyses of oppression and freedom, as experienced in her early life in New Zealand, continued to permeate her fiction and still offer much to be examined and evaluated.

Ngaio Marsh, 1895–1982 Bruce Harding

Dame Ngaio Marsh, the detective novelist, dramatist, short-story writer, theatre producer, non-fiction writer, scriptwriter, autobiographer, painter and critic was born in Christchurch, New Zealand on 23 April 1895. Her birth in the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign and her childhood and adolescence in the twilight—albeit a transferred one—of the Edwardian era were to prove crucial in shaping the prevailing temper and tone of her outlook, particularly when Marsh set out to experiment with writing as a young woman. Her very name enacts a symbolic and liminal binary opposition between Old and New World elements: a confluence echoing the indigenous (the ngaio being a native New Zealand coastal tree) and the imported (a family surname from the coastal marshes of Kent, England). Seen thus, ‘Ngaio’ connotes New World zest—a freshness of outlook, insight and titanic energy—while ‘Marsh’ suggests an Old World gravitas grounded in notions of a stable, class-based lineage and secure traditions. The tension between these twin imperatives and hemispheres drove and energized Marsh’s career and life-pattern (of ongoing dualities: New Zealand-England; writing-production) and enabled her to live what Howard McNaughton has called an incognito/‘alibi career’ in a pre-jet age of sailing boats and vast distances and time horizons between her competing homelands (in Lidgard and Acheson, pp.94-100).

Edith Ngaio Marsh’s Taurian date of birth was both richly symbolic and portentous, given that 23 April is both St George’s Day and the legendary birthdate of Marsh’s beloved Bard, Shakespeare. The other, antipodean, aspect of her dual heritage (father a Londoner, mother New Zealand-born of English stock) is encoded in what became quite early on her preferred first name. Her parents asked an uncle, a lay missionary fluent in the Maori language, to choose a suitable indigenous name for their first-born (as was common practice at the time), and he selected ‘Ngaio’ (pronounced ‘nye-o’) which denotes a native evergreen tree but may also connote ‘expert,’ ‘clever,’ ‘deliberate,’ ‘thorough’ or ‘restless’ (all applicable to Marsh). As an adult, Marsh cut an imposing, dignified and—sometimes—an intimidating, Amazonian figure. Jack Henderson, an early student actor (who played her first Prince Hamlet in 1943) later described Ngaio as ‘tall (5 foot 10 inches), thin, mannish in appearance, flat-chested, rather gawky,’ adding that she dressed ‘usually in beautifully cut slacks’ and possessed ‘large feet with shoes like canal boats’ and had a deep contralto voice yet was ‘intensely feminine withal.’

Marsh, the dynastic romantic, proudly traced her ancestry on her father’s side back to the twelfth-century de Marisco family of pirate lords operating from Lundy Isle (at the entrance to the Bristol Channel), who as Normans spoilt the kingdom of Henry III and harassed the realm along the Devon coast. They were also known as de Montmorency, Marsh and by other derivatives and these malefactors were imprisoned in the Tower and at Newgate and Fleet prisons on charges of high treason. As Marsh wrote, ‘They were kicked out of Lundy and turned up in Kent, where they changed their names to Marsh and many, perhaps on the rebound from piracy, turned Quaker.’ The lineal Marsh family seat was Marton (East Langdon, near Dover). Dame Ngaio’s father, Henry Edmund Marsh, was born in Balham (Surrey) on 9 May 1863 before a family move to Streatham (South London). H. E.’s father, Edmund Ironside Marsh, was a London tea-broker who died when H. E. was 16 but not before he had sent his eldest son as a day boy to Dulwich College (later the public school of P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler). Thus her people were broadly gentry (or upper-middle-class) on the Marsh side, but of a particular sort: neither young sons who long knew that they would have to make their own way, nor Remittance Men (wealthy blackguards sent out to ‘the colonies’ to purify Mother England and paid allowances), but, rather, young men with disappointed expectations. Edward Seager (Marsh’s maternal grandfather) retained specious hopes of a fortune in Chancery but had to train as a blind-maker and schoolmaster, and Marsh’s father’s heritable fortune declined through a series of small, but incremental and downward, reversals. Henry Marsh was the eldest of ten children raised by a widowed mother in straitened circumstances and the males of the family served the Crown or tried to follow careers in the professions. Planning a banking career in Hong Kong, H. E. Marsh did a year in a Lombard Street bank before contracting pleurisy and travelled to South Africa to recuperate and manage a farm in the Cape province where, as a self-styled country-lover and sportsman, he relished the clear air of the veldt and its varied flora and fauna. In 1888 a well-placed uncle secured him a position in the fledgling (and soon insolvent) Colonial Bank in Dunedin, New Zealand. Henry Marsh did find new work as a clerk for the Bank of New Zealand in Christchurch, where he worked modestly until his retirement. Having enjoyed amateur theatricals in England, the young bank clerk eventually met the talented (and deep-voiced) thespian Rose Seager in the context of staging a play in late Victorian Christchurch to raise funds for a Hospital. Miss Seager was a second-generation New Zealander and an actress of outstanding natural talent. Born on 27 July 1864 in Christchurch, she was the daughter of two energetic colonists: Edward William Seager and Esther Coster. The resourceful ‘Gramp’ Seager (as he was to become) arrived in Lyttelton in 1851, acting initially as a marriage-broker in Immigration then joined the police force where he designed the first police uniform in the Canterbury province. Appointed Gaoler-in-Chief of the Lyttleton Gaol, in 1864 Seager was placed in charge of the new Sunnyside Lunatic Asylum (unsurprising given the Victorian presumption of the links between criminality and insanity). At Sunnyside Seager, a kindly man, had practised innovative therapies such as mesmerism, conjuring, amateur theatricals and magic lantern shows with and for his ‘children’ (the inmates). The potent influence of Seager’s criminological work and his lavish exercises in live theatre upon the quick, lively mind and imagination of his grand-daughter Ngaio Marsh can easily be imagined.

Henry and Rose married on 24 April 1894 and rented a home in Carlton Mill Road (Merivale) where their only child, Edith Ngaio, was born on 23 April 1895. After enduring many colds and attacks of influenza there, in 1904 the Marshes purchased a large plot of land out in the country (Cashmere estate) which Henry Marsh wrote of as ‘a perfectly virgin spot with everything to be done to make it both attractive and habitable.’

Marsh remained an only child of loving—if somewhat unconventional—parents. As a mature woman Marsh expanded upon her childhood, describing herself with some asperity as a little girl who ‘was obligingly introverted, delicate, solitary, fanciful, pig-headed and rather morbid.’ She attended a select city dame school (in the company of D’Arcy Cresswell), where she was bullied (describing herself as ‘a highly imaginative young child and not really very strong … with strange fears’). So between the ages of ten and fourteen Ngaio was taught at home by her mother and an itinerant governess, Miss Ffitch, who introduced Ngaio to Shakespeare via —‘of all the plays!’ as Ngaio said (convinced that this primordial work would have been given in an expurgated version, scrubbed of gouged eyes and copulating flies). Dame Ngaio once said that growing up as an only child in ‘Marton Cottage’ (the new Marsh home in the drier and unpopulated Cashmere Hills above Christchurch from 1906) and the family’s Westland camping holidays constituted the ‘halcyon days’ of her busy childhood. Marsh also relished Kipling’s Jungle Books and Just So Stories, Hawthorne’s , Mabel Deamer’s and read Dickens’ , and between the ages of seven and ten. Later, adolescent, reading included George Macdonald, Henry Fielding, Smollett and the Sherlock Holmes stories of Conan Doyle.

In May 1910 Marsh began attending a small independent girls’ school run by an order of Anglo-Catholic nuns. St Margaret’s College was the place where Marsh imbibed her great love of history and firmed up her commitment to the theatre. From the astringent Miss N. G. Hughes (trained at the University of London) Marsh derived what she later called ‘an abiding passion for the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare.’ Ngaio put on plays for the school break-up for three years in a row and also read and wrote stories for the Lower School girls after she was appointed Head Prefect (1912-1913). Marsh also became, for a time, an ardent Anglo-Catholic: ‘When I became a schoolgirl I took out my adolescence in religious fervour and a passion for English literature and history,’ she observed. This was doubtless related to the ceremonial and was an extension of her growing sense of theatre, and her fervour was gradually transformed into a subtle Anglican humanism. Marsh wrote verse and stories and two ‘no doubt rather sickening little fairy plays’: and her striking adaptation of a George Macdonald fairy-tale which she called (produced in September 1913). Marsh later conceded that ‘[t]here were long chunks of very torrid blank verse and a good deal of theeing and thouing’ in the latter play. To be fair, her family lived in an atmosphere redolent of theatre (‘It was rampant on both sides of the family and I cannot remember a time when I did not hear long and entrancing discussions of plays and actors’) and such excesses were likely from a young and passionately literary Edwardian woman.

Marsh attended the conservative School of Art at Canterbury University College (est. 1882) from 1909 on a part-time basis (during her secondary schooling) and then formally enrolled full-time from 1914 to the end of 1919, gaining first-class honours in a Canterbury Society of Arts diploma (1917). Between 1918 and 1925 she published occasional stories and verse in newspaper (being influenced by Walter de la Mare and E. M. Forster) and became intensely involved with local dramatic production. Marsh enjoyed these years immensely, made new friends and won an impressive clutch of scholarships and prizes in composition, studies from life, and for figure composition. She later stated that her work as a painter never ‘panned out right’, adding: ‘I acquired quite a lot of technical skill and got quite a long way with my painting, but I never felt I was doing what New Zealand was about with my paint.’ The deeper and ‘more valid’ impulse was towards words, and the timely visits of the Allan Wilkie Theatre Company from 1916 introduced Ngaio to live Shakespearean production of a professional quality. The Wilkies’ opening night of she later described as ‘the most enchanted I was ever to spend in the theatre.’ Thus inspired, Marsh wrote a melodrama which she called and her mother (ever Ngaio’s great encourager) urged her to show Mr. Wilkie this script. Wilkie offered Marsh a place in his actor-manager’s company for its New Zealand tour of autumn 1920 and her ‘winter of content’ (personal and theatrical fulfilment) steered Marsh firmly into the theatre world. This experience is vividly recalled, in the guise of fiction, in Marsh’s fifth novel, for Marsh once conceded: ‘I wouldn’t have written a book like [1937] if I hadn’t had the personal experience of travelling with the Allan Wilkie Company.’ However, Mrs Marsh would not countenance her unmarried daughter joining the company on an overseas tour and so Marsh taught ‘speechcraft’ (elocution) at a School of Drama and Dancing in Christchurch and then spent much of the 1920s producing a series of travelling vaudeville shows and large-scale fund-raising annual charity pantomimes for an organization known as Unlimited Charities ( [1924], [1925] and her own version of [1926]) under the Chairmanship of Captain Tahu Rhodes. These stylish and highly acclaimed productions moved Marsh into the charming and socially elevated circle of a Canterbury gentry family (that of Tahu and Helen Rhodes) whose English and Irish relations, the Plunkets (many of whom were spread across Kent), she dubbed ‘the Lampreys’ in her 1940 novel . Marsh had already become a familiar figure with the genteel Acland family of Mount Peel Station (near the Rangitata River) after tutoring the son of Sir Hugh Acland in Christchurch and becoming an occasional visitor at Mount Peel from 1916. (She was buried in their family churchyard at the Church of the Holy Innocents in 1982.) From 1927 Marsh also became a foundation member of ‘The Group’, a non-ideological grouping of mainly female visual artists, all trained at CUC School of Art, who clubbed together to pay for a central city studio and models’ fees, and who exhibited together to break the intensely hide-bound, ‘grey-head’ conservatism of the Canterbury Society of Arts. Marsh continued to paint and exhibit with The Group sporadically into the 1930s, although this waned as regular contractual obligations to produce a book per year kicked in.

Marsh sailed to England in 1928 and spent almost five years there with the Rhodes-Plunket families, writing and opening an arts and crafts decorating shop in partnership with the Hon. Mrs Tahu Rhodes in Beauchamp Place (Knightsbridge). Marsh was elected in January 1929 to the Society of Authors (on the strength of a series of syndicated travel articles for the Associated Press in New Zealand as ‘New Canterbury Pilgrim’) and she acquired a flat near Eaton Mansions (SW3) once her mother ‘came Home’ and stayed with Ngaio to see the land of their Seager ancestors. While whiling away boredom on a wet weekend in 1931, Marsh decided to turn her hand to penning a ‘tec’ (having read Sherlock Holmes since she was a small girl and later some Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers novels). By this time Marsh had abandoned her big New Zealand book which she felt, after three chapters, was ‘steaming off busily down the well-worn rails of the colonial novel’ (‘,’ , 22 December 1934) and was keen to attempt the popular genre of ‘teckery’ as an exercise in technique. As a 1974 reviewer noted, traditional detective novelists need ‘to create a separate and slightly artificial’ fictional world, and Marsh probably chose this genre, having accepted her limitations in limning her emergent nation in fiction. Marsh may have shared Curnow’s dim view of the writing of ‘colonial and pre-national’ authors who, he felt, became entrapped in ‘absurd postures, trying to concoct the “national” by colonial pressure-cookery, with much sentimental steam and scraps from Victorian kitchens.’

‘I don’t think that before or since [that] weekend I have ever written with less trouble and certainly never with less distinction,’ Marsh wrote in her autobiography, (1965) of the composition her first novel. Nancy C. Joyner has noted that (1934) ‘is a significant first novel—in that it establishes those characteristics that have come to be Marsh’s hall-marks: the attitude that fictional murder is primarily a game whose first obligation is to amuse, the interest in the habitations of the gently eccentric British middle and upper classes as locales, and the presentation of her perdurable detective, Roderick Alleyn.’ Depositing the typescript of her ‘Opus I’ with an agent, she returned hurriedly to New Zealand in 1932 to nurse her very sick mother and was unable to revisit England and the Continent until 1937, then spending about a year away, continuing to paint scenes in Belgium, Germany, Austria, northern Italy and France and completed (1938)—the novel which introduces her alter ego, the painter Agatha Troy—and wrote (1938) after a memorable dinner party in London with aristocratic friends. Upon her return to New Zealand after this brief sojourn in a Europe teetering towards war, Marsh found her novels being touted as mainstream successes in England, and she continued to look after her elderly widowed father in Cashmere, produced more plays for local repertory societies in New Zealand and sat out the Second World War in real anguish for her friends enduring the privations and turmoil of war in Britain. Marsh wrote a play, , for Canterbury College’s Drama Society (performed in October 1935) with the help of a renowned gynaecologist, Dr Henry Jellett, with whom she co-authored the novel which was published in 1935 as her third crime novel, . During the war, Marsh undertook voluntary aid work (60 hours per fortnight) at Christchurch’s Burwood Hospital, driving repatriated soldiers in a hospital bus all across Canterbury to their homes and was a much-loved Head Section-Leader of the Red Cross Transport Unit. It was while performing these strenuous duties and writing more novels ( [1940], [1941], [1943) and [1944]) that Marsh began a lengthy, legendary and mutually enriching association with the Drama Society (CUC) which resulted in more than twenty full-scale Shakespearean productions, from her 1943 ‘Hamlet in Modern Dress’ until (which starred Sam Neill) in 1969. Forced to stay in New Zealand to attend to her ailing father and because of the war, Marsh brought Alleyn ‘Down Under’ to investigate espionage in and

When Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh came to Australasia with the Old Vic in 1948, Ngaio’s students were asked to entertain the Oliviers after their performance. Marsh was able to get some talented actors started on shaping up the first act of her obsession: Luigi Pirandello’s (1922). The Oliviers advised Marsh to take her troupe to Australia and thus was born the hectic three-week tour of January-February 1949 which Marsh recalled as ‘one of the most exciting things that has ever happened to me.’ It helped her to cope with the loss of her father in September 1948 and also served as a prelude to the establishment of what was hoped would become a permanent travelling repertory. Under Marsh’s direction, the British Commonwealth Theatre Company was set up to celebrate the Festival of Britain in the Commonwealth in 1951 and to circulate around the ‘Dominions.’ To this end Marsh left in mid-1949 for London to recruit thespian talent and arrived for the Penguin ‘Marsh Million’ that July (a gala occasion in which a million of ten of her titles were released on the same day). In January and February 1950 she produced Six Characters for a short season in the Hawtrey family’s Embassy Theatre in London.

1951 was a year of personal triumph and trial: Marsh published the British version of (title: ) and was voted ‘one of the best active mystery writers by an international poll’ (, September 1951). She also brought the BCTC out to open with Shaw’s in Sydney, then moved onwards to New Zealand where primitive staging conditions and poor advertising defeated the enterprise which Marsh later described as ‘a confusing, a baffling, an exciting, an exhilarating and at the same time a disappointing experience’ for her and her highly talented troupe. In 1955 Marsh attended the International Conference on Theatre History in London and in 1960 paid her first visit to the Far East and the United States (where she was treated to a hail of publicity). In 1962 her children’s play (1955) was turned into an opera in a collaboration with the avant-garde New Zealand composer David Farquhar (Marsh wrote the libretto) and given its world premiere as . It was performed again for the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh during the 1963 Royal Tour of New Zealand on the evening which inaugurated the Queen Elizabeth Arts Council. That same year Marsh delivered the Macmillan Brown Lectures on Shakespearean production (‘Three-Cornered World’) and received the first honorary doctorate of literature from Canterbury University. In 1965 Little, Brown published Marsh’s autobiography, and in June 1966 she became Dame Ngaio Marsh (Civil Division) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. In July 1967 she produced to open the Ngaio Marsh Theatre in Christchurch and her final full-scale production was of at the close of 1972 (when she was 77 years of age) to open the theatre in the new Christchurch Town Hall civic complex. Marsh’s last theatrical effort was to write and produce in 1976 a one-man show on the Bard of Avon, , in collaboration with Jonathan Elsom, one of her protégés, after her final visit to the United Kingdom which had become her second home and a place she visited regularly.

Life had to be quieter in these autumnal years but Marsh loved to entertain and her home (now a house museum) remained a lively gathering place for her wide circle of friends. 1978 was, in many ways, an annus mirabilis for Dame Ngaio, for in March she received the Grand Master Award of the MWA, and in September her phenomenally successful thirtieth novel, , was published. In the same year a New Zealand television company (South Pacific Television) released adaptations of four of her novels as ‘Ngaio Marsh Theatre.’ Dame Ngaio spent 1979 continuing to write the bulk of her novel , which was published in 1980 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Collins Crime Club, underscoring the fact that she was indisputably the last of the original Golden Age ‘Crime Queens.’ Further ill-health forced Marsh to employ a full-time live-in housekeeper and, sensing that her time was drawing to a close, she updated her autobiography and finally tackled the difficult novel which she had so long nursed a strong urge to write, , which confronts the theatrical taboo surrounding ‘the Scottish play’ and which provides a superb insight into how Marsh believed should be staged. She just managed to complete this text in her new study (with its expansive views of both her English-New Zealand country garden and of her beloved Southern Alps mountain range) a mere six weeks before her death: a gentle passing in the dignity of her own home occasioned by a speedy cerebral haemorrhage. Thus Dame Ngaio Marsh’s long, intensely productive and fruitful summer was at an end.

Over a fifty-year span from 1931 to 1982 Ngaio Marsh wrote 32 classic English detective novels (‘whodunnits’)—from which her global fame derives—while simultaneously building a New Zealand-wide reputation as a distinguished theatre director with a predilection for the plays of Shakespeare. A contemporary of Dorothy L. Sayers, Marjory Allingham and Dame Agatha Christie, Marsh was the only ‘colonial’ author who came to be lauded as a member of this illustrious quartet of Golden Age ‘Queens of Crime.’ Marsh also published works of non-fiction including two books about New Zealand and monographs on dramatic production and the visual arts in her homeland. In addition, she continued working as a highly competent visual artist, executing and exhibiting a variety of oil paintings from the 1920s into the 1930s before her dual career as a crime novelist and producer of repertory theatre limited these endeavours to making scenic and costume designs for her long extended season of Shakespearean productions at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) from 1943-1969.

Marsh’s singular achievement was to capture international acclaim in literature and the arts while contributing to nurturing the cultural life of her homeland, a contribution that was explicitly recognized in 1951 when she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA). Marsh was also made a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1978 for a lifetime’s achievement in the genre (a tribute which meant a great deal as she was honoured with Dame Daphne du Maurier). Furthermore, as a citizen of the British Commonwealth, Marsh was awarded the OBE in 1948 and was created Dame Ngaio (Dame Commander of the British Empire) in 1966. In 1962 she received the first Honorary Doctor of Literature degree conferred by her alma mater, the University of Canterbury.

At her death, the late Professor James Bertram argued that Marsh was, with Katherine Mansfield and Frances Hodgkins, ‘one of the first New Zealanders to achieve full professional standing in a major artistic field.’ However, the Yale historian Robin Winks observed that ‘When Ngaio Marsh was at the height of her powers, the New Zealand literary establishment tended to belittle her novels as ‘popular culture,’ a subject which today is widely studied and accepted in the most august of critical and academic circles.’ Jacques Barzun added that while some famous literary critics ‘went out of their way’ to label ‘mysteries’ a lowbrow form, ‘[t]his was contrary to fact; detective stories were written by and for highbrows.’ Terry Sturm, writing long after Marsh’s death, seems to have accepted the unjustness of an allied local version of literary snobbism, arguing:

Despite the oft-expressed view, especially among New Zealand critics, that Marsh’s was an essentially outdated colonial Anglophile sensibility, there was in fact considerable complexity in the relationship between ‘New Zealand’ and ‘English’ elements in her life and art, and her affinities were much closer to the new high-cultural nationalist-realist impulses of the 1930s and 1940s than to the earlier literature of colonial exile.

The clear implication is that Marsh struggled to decolonize her outlook away from being the neo-colonial focused loyally on the imperial art-Centre (London) and that she gradually came to accept her fluid, hybrid status as one whose significant cultural interventions and contributions in theatre were made on ‘the periphery’ and that, like her friends the composer Douglas Lilburn and poet Allen Curnow, New Zealand constituted a valid ‘here’ in the production of art. The dilemma of the sensitive New Zealander attracted to metropolitan style but belonging to New Zealand was limned in the figures of Roberta Gray (Surfeit of Lampreys), Dikon Bell (Colour Scheme) and Cliff Johns (Died in the Wool)—young people caught in the irreconcilable pull between local belonging and Northern Hemisphere sophistication and aesthetic-intellectual variety, and all too aware at the same time that valid national art cannot be force-fed. This dilemma of hemispheric stress (and what Winks once called ‘myths of islandhood’) was very much on Marsh’s mind in the 1940s as a National Orchestra and National Theatre were being discussed in small-scale New Zealand, and her views were well expressed in a published dialogue that she had with Allen Curnow in 1945.

However, Marsh had her detractors, notably Edmund Wilson. Deriding a field which ‘is mostly on a sub-literary level,’ Wilson arraigned Marsh’s Overture to Death, insisting that ‘I do not see how it is possible for anyone with a feeling for words to describe the unappetizing sawdust which Miss Marsh has poured into her pages as “excellent prose” or as prose at all except in the sense that distinguishes prose from verse.’ Much less acerbically, Julian Symons (an admirer of her work) wrote that Marsh’s ‘capacity for amused observation of the undercurrents beneath ordinary social interchanges was so good that one hoped for more than she ever tried to do,’ citing Night at the Vulcan (1951) where she took ‘refuge from real emotional problems in the official investigation and interrogation of suspects.’ Symons concluded that ‘engaging though the books are, one is bound to regret that Ngaio Marsh did not take her fine talent more seriously.’

The first nine or so of Marsh’s novels adhere quite strongly to the exigencies of the Golden Age formula (with jokey references to Christie and Sayers and an early self-consciousness about the form, which suggests an author kindly laughing at her own art), but in them Ngaio gradually psychologized her characters beyond stiff stock types and also experimented with techniques of oblique narration to disguise the criminal while writing many others in the third dimension. Her obituary in justly noted that Marsh ‘was one of those writers who, during the 1930s, raised the detective novel to a high level of literary art.’ In novels such as Vintage Murder, Colour Scheme (1943) and Died in the Wool (1944) Marsh satirized what she once called the fact that New Zealanders ‘are an extraordinarily insular set of people,’ adding: ‘I wouldn’t say that a very lively or vivid imagination is a national characteristic.’ In this neo-colonial view Marsh explains one reason why she always found London to be ‘an extraordinarily exhilarating place.’ However, with Surfeit of Lampreys Marsh provided an alter-ego character, Roberta Gray, and a more balanced assessment of the NZ-UK admixture and launched into a Cowardian ‘comedy of manners’ mode that makes her novels Death in a White Tie (1938), Death and the Dancing Footman (1941), Colour Scheme, Final Curtain (1947) and False Scent (1959) such superb satirical exercises about egomaniacal (and frequently theatrical) personalities. These are among the most uproariously comic of Marsh’s explorations of the joke of death topos amidst high society milieux. Susan Baker has traced Marsh’s use of Shakespearean motifs in several novels, notably Singing in the Shrouds (1958) and Night at the Vulcan (1949) as illustrating her ‘high culture’ view of the Bard as a marker of status and her conviction that ‘not everyone is entitled to Shakespearean authority’; in other words, ‘Marsh’s etiquette for Bardinage apparently requires that one know both Shakespeare and the tacit rules for Shakespeare citation.’

Marsh’s first biographer, Margaret Lewis, was surely right to observe that Marsh’s ‘later novels became increasingly outdated regarding police methods, with Alleyn and [his offsider] Fox inhabiting a kind of undefined time-warp vaguely associated with the 1950s’ (Lewis, p.61). This is to beg the wider question of realism in the ‘classic’ whodunnit and misses the point that Marsh’s strengths as a subtle and nuanced novelist of character absurdities and sophisticated, mordant wit make later novels—such as Clutch of Constables (1968), Black as He’s Painted (1974), Grave Mistake (1978) and Light Thickens (1982)—so successful and elegantly literate. However, Lewis is right to alight on a point made by Jessica Mann—that Marsh’s extreme reticence and use of a mask to shield her inner life from public view may have vitiated the impact of her work and ‘diminished the life of her novels’ (Mann, p.233).

It is clear that the pre-Great War period (of the Edwardian twilight in Britain) was preserved in ‘twenties and ‘thirties detective fiction and that Marsh was to a degree marooned, by her historical-geographical location, between the colonial and post-colonial eras of national identity formation in her birthland. As such, her corpus usefully fossilizes a long-lost mindset of the obedient colonial who held to an idealized view of England. In addition, it is clear that Marsh wished to practise ‘safe’ art as a theatre director and as a writer (providing emotional protection and maintaining her mystique as a highly controlled and self-sufficient person). This ‘Miss Tame Lion’ role goes a long way to explain why Marsh operated within a safe Colonial Imaginal and relished the stylized satirical prose of the English comedy of manners tradition, recalling Marshall McLuhan’s argument that the ‘pointless ingenuity of construction’ in pseudo-scientific novels of detection ‘corresponds to our scientific skills divorced from contact with our emotional needs’. Any admission of affective need that she must have felt might compromise Marsh’s image of strict control and rectitude as a dutiful daughter of Albion (in this she was somewhat akin to Virginia Woolf and Nancy Mitford). In fact, Marsh was actually a deeply generous woman behind the rather stiff and forbidding persona, which she fashioned for self-protection and to secure much-needed creative ‘space’ (perhaps relishing crime fiction as a form which insulated her from impertinent critical or literary inquiries and allowing her to retain her own thoughts and integrity of personhood). There is no question, however, but that in her dual careers as a play producer and professional author Marsh gave aesthetic form to such traditional aristocratic/ ‘posho-cratic’ social values as hierarchy, restraint and rigidly codified behaviour.

It is a commonplace of modern criticism that rhetorical figures in texts may correspond to psychological defence mechanisms in the psyches of authors. This thesis certainly holds a degree of validity in the stylishly evasive detective fictions of Dame Ngaio. Jill Ker Conway has reminded us of what was almost certainly also Marsh’s dilemma: that in her early days as a ‘gamine’ (boyish) figure, it would have ‘troubled people to think of women owning and running their own turf’—’Ergo it was deviant, and since women were defined by their bodies and not their minds and talents, it had to be sexually deviant, and … had to be intellectually weak.’ Conway’s statement brilliantly captures a strain of disdainful New Zealand commentary about Marsh (in particular for not following the male cultural-nationalist writers, such as Sargeson, as they championed proletarian realism in the wake of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Saroyan et al.)—commentary that betrayed jealousy at her conspicuous international success as a ‘popular’ author, for being a local celebrity, and for her Anglophilic, often opinionated and olympian cultural commentary.

Marsh liked writing to entertain and happily purloined Graham Greene’s term ‘entertainments’ to describe her approach to the craft of ‘detective cookery/bookery’ in a late essay. Marsh always robustly defended the form in an age of shapeless fiction, arguing that the classical discipline of the detective story has much to commend it: ‘In the seventeenth century, metaphysical poets fitted their verse into diamonds, hearts and triangles. I like to think we may be doing something the same.’ Marsh believed that detective fiction is by its nature shapely and, as such, ‘can command our aesthetic approval’ and explained why:

It must have a beginning, a middle and an end. The middle must be an extension and development of the beginning and the end must be implicit in both. The writing is as good as the author can make it: nervous, taut, balanced and economic. Descriptive passages are vivid and explicit. The author is not self-indulgent. If he commands a good style, there is every reason for maintaining it. In an age of immensely long and undisciplined novels we can do with some shapely ones and in the midst of much pretentious obscurity a touch of lucidity is not unwelcome. (‘Entertainments’, p.3).

Marsh saw herself as an ‘impure’ practitioner, in a second stream removed from the amateur/eccentric sleuth tradition of Sherlock Holmes. Marsh distinguished between the original, slightly effete, ‘pure’ puzzle formula founded by Poe, Conan Doyle and Gaboriau (a game ‘played, strictly according to the rules, between author and reader’ in which the characters ‘however animated or enchanting are two-dimensional’) and those later authors like herself, Frances Iles, Sayers, Allingham, Michael Innes and C. Day Lewis (and much later P. D. James), who attempted to write in the third dimension and to move beyond what she calls (in ‘Entertainments’) ‘the slippered cosiness of a good read,’ as first assayed in Wilkie Collins’ and Dickens’ unfinished . This notion of fiction written more realistically but still one foot off the ground (what John Mortimer has called ‘writing at a Dickens level’) is applicable to Marsh’s novels.

Ngaio Marsh grew up in an era in which New Zealand was a bit-part player in the grand British imperial narrative and it is unfair to pillory her for assenting to the prevalent attitude of well-heeled Kiwi Britons who, in Leslie Lipson’s words, were long in denial about their Southwest Pacific location, their outlook remaining ‘that of a north Atlantic people’ who ‘have felt these islands to be a fragment of the British Isles which, by some over-sight of the Creator, was put on the wrong side of the globe.’ Marsh unquestionably aped the ‘high culture’ master texts of the centre (London), was mentally colonized by metrocentric ‘Britishness’ and was unquestionably a fully consenting member of an imperialized space (her crime novels allowed Marsh to live imaginatively in England). Lawrence Jones has argued that in the early twentieth century the ‘view of New Zealand as a “privileged happyland” co-existed with its shadow, the fear that it might really be a “miserable banishment” from the England where all virtues resided.' For her part, Marsh was happy to produce ethical fables of social conformity and good order, following the Golden Age prescription for a stratified social world and for an ambience reflecting an eternally Edwardian value-structure. That such a validation of social and spatial order was regularly upheld by a New Zealand woman bred in colonial Canterbury ought to occasion no surprise if we accept historian James Belich’s contention that Anglo-Zealanders invested much energy in replicating ‘a pan-British compound culture to which New Zealand had contributed its mite.’ The New Zealand novelist Maurice Shadbolt once wrote perceptively that while Marsh spent, on average, one year in three as an adoptive Londoner, she spent most of her days living alone in the ‘dark-panelled and book-filled house her father built…on a verdant hillside above Christchurch’ and that from her Cashmere eyrie, ‘Beyond quiet suburbs and spires rise the peaks of the Southern Alps, vivid substance of the rugged native country she has never quite managed to escape.’ Indeed, it was (as she would have wished) in her own comfortable New Zealand home that, in February 1982, Dame Ngaio bade the world goodnight, eight weeks short of her 87th birthday and having just approved the galleys of her final novel, Light Thickens, which magnificently fuses all the core strands of her long and exuberant life: New Zealand-England, Shakespeare, the live theatre and crime fiction. It was a stylish swan-song to cap a life of great fulfilment and signal achievement.

Robin Hyde (Iris Wilkinson), 1906-1939 Mary Edmond-Paul

Robin Hyde, poet, novelist, journalist, is now acknowledged as a major figure in New Zealand twentieth-century culture, although the literary nationalist group that became prominent in New Zealand in the late thirties and early forties temporarily eclipsed her reputation. Hyde had an immensely productive short life but the self-doubt and anxiety that had plagued her were exacerbated by the social isolation of London and she committed suicide there at the age of thirty-three. During her lifetime Hyde was well-known as an outspoken journalist and literary commentator as well as poet and novelist; her intelligence as a writer, the stylistic interest and beauty of her work, and her ability to encapsulate and comment on contemporary society have only been fully understood as her novels have been brought back into print, her autobiographical writings discovered, and unpublished papers—including poems, letters and short fiction—further studied in the context of her life. These new discoveries reveal her as a female modernist, even in some respects a New Zealand Frida Kahlo figure, whose physical suffering and experience of gender politics in personal and professional life gave her work a special resonance; and because Hyde’s writing drew so much on her own experience, it is of particular importance to understand her literary and personal history together.

Hyde was born Iris Wilkinson in Cape Town on the nineteenth of January 1906. Her family history reveals a complex engagement in imperial projects—war, communications, and colonial administration—that characterised a significant part of the movement of population to New Zealand and other Commonwealth countries at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her father, George Edward was born in Agra, where his father (originally from Yorkshire) had a successful career in the Indian Civil Service. At eighteen years old he joined an Anglo-Indian corps to fight in the Boer War. After the war hospitalised with war wounds, his wife-to-be, a twenty-nine-year-old Australian, working in South Africa en route to England, nursed him. Unsure as to employment, George finally settled with the post and telegraph service and when Adelaide (Nelly) née Butler fell pregnant they married. Following the birth of their second daughter, Iris, the family sailed for New Zealand, perhaps assuming that country would also need young men with experience in communications systems; but prospects for advancement in the years of war and Depression that followed proved slim.

Soon after their arrival in Wellington, New Zealand, George got a position, as a sorter and clerical worker in the Post and Telegraph Department, where he remained (apart from service overseas during the First World war) for the thirty-four years of his working life. Iris was the second of four daughters, the third and fourth were born in New Zealand, and their mother maintained a constant vigilance over their appearance and manners to ensure they grew up proper middle-class girls, notwithstanding the working-class suburbs in which their father’s low income and health (a war wound to his leg meant that cycling from a more salubrious hill suburb was too tiring) obliged them to live. But George Wilkinson’s socialist and questioning attitudes were very different from those of his wife. He brought home books and loved discussion about politics as well as philosophy and literature. What irritated George’s wife gave his daughter Iris an interest in acquiring a broad and international perspective on society and the world—visible not only in her novels but also from early on in her journalistic writing.

Iris Wilkinson was talented at school in all subjects—except for mathematics—and her love of poetry and recitation was already noted by the time she was seven years old when the teacher allowed her to read her own poems out to the class—poems that were apparently on fanciful and imaginative subjects such as moon and stars, fairies and elves. In the bio-fictional novel, , Hyde recounts a formative adventure when on a summer evening visit to a Wellington beach (Island Bay) she went missing and was found curled up, alone in a little fishing dinghy composing verses. The adventure culminates in a furious mother, only mollified by the quality of her daughter’s verses, presenting Iris with an exercise book for her future compositions

Iris was an intelligent child who desired to heal rifts in her parent’s marriage by giving dignity and status to her much criticised father. This matches the portrait of an imaginative and intelligent but over-sensitive child that Hyde later drew of Eliza in Godwits. Hyde also later commented both in an (unpublished) essay on mental health and in her autobiographical writing on the mental injuries sustained by children in situations of family conflict—and this also became a theme in a number of her novels. George spent two years overseas during the war; but though his family believed that he was initially in action at Salonika, war records show he served only in the United Kingdom—with the Postal Service of the New Zealand Engineers.

The imagery and anecdotes of empire and war provided inspiration for Iris’s early writing, as did bible stories and prayers. During the summer holidays of 1916 she participated in a contest to compose the best prayer for the children’s mission hour; Iris wrote several entries and distributed some to other children. When one of the latter was the winner, the prize-winner burst into tears and confessed that Iris had written it. Iris also continued to enjoy delivering dramatic renderings of her own and others’ poems with which she recalls terrifying her sisters. The local church minister described her as a: ‘small chubby child with a quick brain . . . .a reciter . . . much to the fore at Sunday school concerts’ who would ‘deliver her lines with unclouded confidence and surprising vigour, every part of her body contributing to the general effect’ (Challis/Rawlinson, 751).

George returned from war in 1918 and his soldier’s gratuity enabled the Wilkinsons to buy their own home—to move from the working-class areas of Newtown and Berhampore to the respectability of a large house and garden in the suburb of Northland. Iris, as the family scholar, was privileged with an upstairs bedroom of her own, next to a balcony. Nelly now determined that regardless of cost all her daughters should have a secondary education. In 1919 Iris began at Wellington Girls’ College where she almost immediately made her first close friend and published a prize-winning short story and poems in the school magazine. By dint of her writing talents she avoided some of the inevitable unpopularity that went with being too bookish, and no good at sports. Her best friend, Gwen Hawthorn, was, like Iris, ambitious of life and experience, wanting to be a painter; the two of them had pretensions to sophistication that set them apart from their schoolmates. In her poems Iris was already using the Arthurian characters and themes that were to be of continuous interest to her, and while still at school she began sending poems (unsuccessfully at first) to New Zealand and Australian journals, , and .

In 1921 Iris was awarded a scholarship that would have enabled her to attend university but failing mathematics meant she could not matriculate (graduate), and although she did eventually pass her exams she never used this scholarship. Her last year at school was also the year she met Harry Sweetman, the young man she always considered her soul mate. Harry worked with her father at Post and Telegraph, where they discussed books, and aspired to travel and be a writer. In April 1922 George brought him home to meet his poet daughter; the two got on so well that the next day Harry appeared improbably at her school wanting to give Iris some books and copies of his poems.

The intensity of this relationship was fuelled by Harry’s idea of himself as a Jack London figure (he had given up an earlier intention of going to university in favour of the romance of manual labour and being an ordinary bloke and a great lover) and was about to set off working down country near Rangitikei where he was setting up telephone lines. His letters to Iris were composed in working men’s camps, letters she used later in her characterisation of Timothy in her biofictional novel The Godwits Fly. Iris replied at length—though her letters do not survive. On their next meeting in March 1923 Harry was permitted to stay at the Wilkinson’s house. Hyde appears to have seen this relationship as one of the most important of her life—one in which she was truly able to give love—and it was a relationship that continued to be developed, long after his death, in all her writing—most significantly in her poetry. In the same year best friend Gwen moved to a further off suburb, also highlighting the importance of writing in maintaining friendships. An exercise book entitled ‘Iris Wilkinson, Wellington Girls’ College, Form VI B’ is the earliest collection of Hyde’s poems still extant.

Under pressure to contribute to the family economy, Iris, on leaving school, applied for a position as a journalist cadet on the local newspaper and began work there early in 1923 about the time of her seventeenth birthday. Her choice of newspaper, or success in getting the position, may have had something to do with the fact that the Dominion had, in 1921, published an enthusiastic article about her under the heading ‘Schoolgirl Poetess.’ The experience of working for her first ‘hard, but just boss,’ C. W. Earle, was to be one of many important mentoring relationships Hyde developed in the newspaper world (Challis/Rawlinson, 44). She was fascinated by the romance of the newspaper traditions: the ‘morgue’, for example, where the paper kept files of its own and overseas papers that ‘went right back into the days of gallantry and esprit’. She wrote about these files later in . Her salary was an impressive thirty shillings a week, and she was treated with friendly humour by the older men who nick-named her ‘Buttercup’ or in times of stress, ‘Ginger Mick!’ The editor encouraged her writing, albeit in a stereotypically gendered move, by making her the inaugural editor of the children’s page of the . As Mary Advocate she wrote a letter to the children, answered correspondence and filled the remainder of the page with stories and poems. She also contributed her own zoo stories, in which various animals were interviewed.

In Easter 1924 Iris took a break from her paper to visit Harry Sweetman, now in Auckland, with whom she had a maintained an important and intense correspondence. A moonlight picnic she described later in a letter to his brother as a ‘wild affair of grapes and nectarines and madness’ was the last time she was to see Harry. In the same week she returned to Wellington she was suddenly bedridden with swelling to her knee; she herself gave differing explanations for this but it seems it was most probably a tubercular infection brought on by an injury. The condition was very serious and involved eight months in hospital where treatment was a painful repeated setting and resetting of the joint under sedation with chloroform and large doses of morphine post operatively, resulting in a permanent injury and a long-term reliance on drugs. Initial prognosis that the knee would eventually regain normal function, never eventuated—and the ensuing years saw her often seeking pain relief and comfort from morphine or other sedatives.

The family saw this accident as a turning point in Iris’s life, giving her an inferiority complex and making her irritable, but their judgment must have been as difficult to handle as the injury. In the short term her disability gave her a legitimate reason for leaving home and renting her own quarters in town—necessary as she was required to attend late sittings of parliament in her new position as ‘Novitia’, writing a column entitled ‘.’ She was employed not as an official parliamentary reporter but as a promising young writer whom the editor hoped might liven up (and perhaps de-politicise) the routine of parliamentary reporting from the Ladies’ Gallery; the position, though it apparently became wearying, gave her name some prominence and introduced her to major figures in New Zealand public life, including Labour member and novelist John A. Lee (who became a close friend) and Prime Minister Coates. ‘It does entertain you, when you’re only eighteen still, to have tea in state and in private with a Cabinet Minister who loves to hear himself talk to the young and feminine,’ she later recalled in (p. 32). Some of the trials of the column must have come from the instruction by the , a conservative and anti-Labour paper, to ignore the Labour members who ‘provided at least 90% of the speeches and almost all of the dramatic incidents of the long night watches’. Her response: ‘one might as well ask for a snappy scenario about Adam and Eve leaving out any reference to the Serpent’ (Journalese, p. 38).

When, improved in health, Iris wrote again to Harry Sweetman, whom she had lost touch with during her illness; she received the news that he was leaving for the kind of overseas adventure they had discussed embarking on together. His departure in October 1925 seems to have been a great shock and disappointment to her—but she also protested that he was expecting her to wait like an Ariadne or Penelope for his return. However, the relationship with an older member of parliament, Dan Sullivan, may have also had a significant impact. We know that she admired Sullivan, then a senior whip, and that John A. Lee (not always the most reliable source) suggested that there was a love affair. Sullivan, twenty-four years older than her but still with his shock of dark curly hair, looked surprisingly youthful and was ‘liked and respected across the political spectrum for his personal warmth, conciliatory nature, integrity, humanitarian ideals and hard work.’

For whatever reason, sometime around Christmas 1925 Iris decided to use an uncle’s annuity to take a holiday from Wellington and the newspaper. Rotorua, where further treatment for her knee in the thermal waters was prescribed, was the chosen destination, but it was a more glamorous holiday than this suggests. She stayed at a comfortable resort hotel (probably the historic Princes Gate) and took advantage of the opportunity to socialise and wear the new dresses she had bought with her improving salary. She looked so well she felt no one would ever know she ‘had been broken and put back together again’. Here she had time to write; several poems, including ‘A Daughter to her Mother’ and ‘Sandcastles’ were sent from Rotorua to the but following this Iris did not publish for more than a year.

A young veteran RAF fighter pilot, Frederick de Mulford Hyde, was holidaying at the same hotel with a group of friends. In her own version a nightmare prompted by the roaring of lions from a visiting circus allowed him to comfort her on the very first night at the hotel and he expedited a love affair by moving out of the hotel into a house, where Iris visited him. In a letter to friend Gwen she described the relationship flippantly as ‘a more or less desert-shiekish love affair.’ However, when Iris found she was pregnant, Frederick’s attentions seemed suddenly less enthusiastic and telling him coincided with more painful mistreatment of her knee at the Rotorua Sanitorium, leaving her even more disabled. Frederick’s initial response, that it was impossible that she was pregnant, was made worse by the fact that he appeared suddenly repelled by her disability. A generic dramatisation of a similar scene of male shock at ‘pregnancy-news’ occurs in her novel ; Hyde’s wider analysis of gender relations (between the wars) in this and other novels interrogates experiences of betrayal and misunderstanding between the sexes.

According to Iris’s autobiographical account, her mother summoned Frederick to Wellington to get him to make an offer of marriage but she determined against this solution. Whatever the decision, an unmarried pregnancy necessitated leaving town—and Frederick agreed to finance the journey to Sydney and provide a little towards Iris’s living expenses. In April she sailed for Sydney; her first accommodation was cheap digs in Surrey Hills where she gained insight into the psychology of poverty, later useful in her novels. She also observed the variety of the city, spent time in the Sydney Public Library and read Nietzsche under ‘enormous Moreton Bay figs in Centennial Park’.

There is little information to corroborate any of the differing versions that Hyde tells of the pregnancy. Whether she had planned an adoption; whether the pregnancy was terminated or she miscarried; whether the baby was born prematurely or was full-term, still born or died at birth (in differing accounts it made its appearance somewhere between June and November)—is not clear. However we do know that she moved house to the more comfortable suburb of Stanmore and made a supportive friend, a young nurse. (In The Godwits Fly Eliza saves money for a private room at a local nursing home—a lovely old house with jacaranda trees outside the window—but when the time comes her child, a son, dies at birth.) In whichever circumstances, Iris was, at only twenty-years-old, recovering from a secret pregnancy and the death of her baby. Though the baby had no legal identity she gave him the name Christopher Robin Hyde, (in a gesture of defiance using his father’s surname—as something for Frederick ‘to remember or outface’) and from around this time she began taking ‘Robin Hyde’ as her own writing name—her ‘nom de guerre’ as she called it. She also dated her commitment to writing—particularly to poetry—as arising at this time.

[24] That the father’s name was ‘Hyde’ was only revealed by Derek Challis in 1998: see Challis, ’The Fate of the Iris Wilkinson (Robin Hyde) Manuscripts’ JNZL 16, 1998, 22-32 (published and updated at the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre in 2003). It was previously assumed that the name ‘Hyde’ was the author’s invention (as is Derek’s name ‘Challis’) echoing ‘Robin Hood’ or suggesting ‘hiding’ and being tough of ‘hide’.

(The detail with which Hyde described the months in Sydney in later autobiographical writings and in The Godwits Fly suggests that she consistently kept detailed journals as well as writing letters, but, if so, these have not survived.)

By September Nelly Wilkinson had arrived to support her daughter. Mother and daughter were passengers on the Ulimaroa from Sydney to Auckland, arriving 30 November 1926 in Auckland. Iris sent a cable from the ship to Frederick—seeking his emotional support. He, however, had just married. His new wife, Alice Algie, was a widow ten years his senior; Iris had known of their relationship and discounted it, but now discovered her mistake. Even her own love-making with Frederick, Iris learnt, had taken place at a house owned by Alice. However, in spite of a sense of betrayal Iris seems to have spent several unhappy weeks in Rotorua being looked after by the newly married couple. From a book of handwritten poems titled ‘’ (Gwen Hawthorn) we know that, distressed as she was, she was writing again by Christmas.

Sometime after Christmas 1926 Frederick drove Iris to Hamilton to catch a train to Wellington, but she visited chemist shops to purchase a variety of hypnotics and sedatives and ended the day, not on board the train, but at the hospital. Her mother arrived on the scene once again and supported her through subsequent months of intense mental and physical breakdown, consulting a range of more-or-less sympathetic doctors and caring for her at Northland Road. But she did so without divulging to the rest of the family the precipitating reasons for her daughter’s mental distress. Meanwhile Iris (now becoming better known as Robin Hyde) could be seen on the verandah of the family home writing and reading.

A series of poems written at this time describe (and sometimes address) a flirtatious Pierrette (a female Pierot based on friend Gwen); Hyde’s longing for a simpler naïve, girlish time in her own past is conveyed in the image of this lovely female clown. The poems are markedly similar both stylistically and in mood to the much admired, late poem sequence, ‘. The sensuous ‘ (composed by December 1926) appeared in on 26 May 1927, was one of the first to published under the name Robin Hyde:

Rain-murmurings; the wind whines and snuffles, wet As a poor dog whose lord has ceased to care For faithful things like dogs. And you, Pierette With little firelit face and firegold hair Curled like a kitten in an easy chair

The Pierrette poems are sourced from the Little Saint Christopher manuscript book, which collects Hyde’s poems to late 1927. Its dedication:

To the Little Saint Christopher: The gods of beauty seek in the Spring From out of the world’s white flowering Some delicate thing to keep . . . Sleep, child, sleep

is a poem by Rachel Annand Taylor to which Hyde has added a final line, and is the same as that used in The Godwits Fly to describe protagonist Eliza’s emotion at her baby’s death. In this manuscript book are a number of poems for Robin—one of these tender poems, until recently unpublished, is titled ‘To C. R. H.’ and finishes: ‘His little feet will learn to run/on rose-white ways, where by no thorn/May baby-tenderness be torn.’ Many of the poems we can now see as having a further not simply rhetorical dimension, coded with their author’s secret suffering and sense of belonging to another sadder world.

Though during April 1927 Hyde was regularly sending poems to the Auckland , the Sydney , the Christchurch and Victoria University College’s she was still confused and unhappy. It was only in May 1927 at Queen Mary Hospital at Hanmer in Canterbury that she began to regain her peace of mind. The freedom and independence from her family and the beauty and resources of the place were significant but so was a sympathetic doctor, who saw that her condition was attributable to a ‘history.’ Poems such as the tranquil ‘’ date from this time, as does an important and long correspondence with the literary editor of the Christchurch Sun, John Schroder, who wrote complimenting Hyde on her poems. This was to become an important personal and literary friendship; more than 100 letters that Hyde wrote to him from 1927 to 1939 survive.

In October Hyde left the hospital and, en route to Wellington, visited Christchurch, where she met the editor and others on the Sun newspaper and discussed future writing projects with John Schroder. He was struck by her on first meeting:

She could run away with a suggestion for a literary article and be running back with the finished—and excellent—copy, while another would still be pondering and plodding. She had read little or no Conrad when I told her there was an article, perhaps, in those statuesque, enigmatic women characters of his; but she had read enough in a day or so to write a critical piece that was small, clear lamp of light. (Challis/Rawlinson p. 92)

Back in Wellington in November 1927 Hyde made the acquaintance of literary editor and journalist Charles Marris, who was to become another valuable mentor, and found employment with the National Tourist Bureau travelling and writing and, when that position finished, freelancing. A poem and her first short story won prizes from the Sun newspaper and her correspondence with Schroder continued; they often discussed books they admired—including and novels by Stella Benson. Unsettling to her new equilibrium though was the news that her first love Harry Sweetman had died more than eighteen months earlier, in February 1926, in Manchester of pneumonia.

During 1928, freelance work was getting harder to find and she could not work for The Dominion having previously resigned a position there. In August there was another loss when best friend Gwen married (Hyde thought for expedience not love) and this added to her sense of being deserted and demoralised. Hyde was, she claimed, not going to marry till ‘the age of the wireless hits the kitchen and by then I’ll be too old and shrivelled’. She clearly objected to women being cut off from public life but as a woman who wanted everything she also expressed romantic longings, more obliquely, in the love poem ‘ written round this time. September brought her, temporarily, a new position on a different kind of paper: the scandal mongering , a position that could have suited someone who had always preferred to write the ‘scurrilous paragraph about a public man’ to ‘the adulatory one about some welfare women’. An article on spiritualists and healers is interesting for its relationship to her later preoccupation with contacting her own dead lover and baby and is also echoed in Wednesday’s Children, but she was finding the unremitting and absolute commitment to journalism difficult, making her feel ‘cold and metallic’ and when the position was not confirmed looked for a more sympathetic opening.

The beginning of 1929 saw Hyde visiting the Duffs (Oliver Duff was the associate editor of the ) and by February she was working for the Sun where she remained for a friendly and tranquil three months; in Christchurch she regularly met a group of journalists and writers including poet Jessie Mackay, in whose opinion ‘Eileen Duggan and Robin Hyde between them lay the foundations of New Zealand literature’. Why she left this congenial environment is not clear—though her biographer, son Derek Challis, suggests that a brief affair with a fellow journalist, Mac Vincent, may have cooled the relationship with Schroder, or it may have been simply that the offer of a more lucrative position as lady editor on the was too good to refuse.

In Wanganui Hyde was busy with her column as ‘Margot’ on the women’s page, where she managed to smuggle in interesting articles on writers, being bohemian, women smoking and rural women—some of which were reprinted nationally. She worked long hours and was obliged to attend and write up the provincial city’s social events, all of which militated against pursuing her own poetry. Nevertheless, she corresponded frequently with John Schroder planning her first collection, , which was published in November 1929 to enthusiastic reviews, notably from poet Jessie MacKay and journalist Alan Mulgan. The provincial town was impressed by her talent but at the same time kept a sharp eye on her comings and goings, especially what was, in some versions, a very public love affair with a fellow journalist, and as it turned out married man, Lawson Smith. This relationship seems to have been, partly at least, a plan to conceive another child. She wrote to friend Gwen, ‘Shall I have him for the father of my Tane? . . . . It is becoming maddeningly necessary to my life to have a child’. Friend and occasional poet Ishbel Veitch and her husband regretted they had introduced Hyde to spiritualism—in séances at their house she more or less seriously attempted to contact her son and Harry—but they knew little of her past or her future plans.

By February 1930, knowing she was once again pregnant and refusing the offer of £20 for an abortion from the father, Hyde organised a visit to Christchurch on the way to the remote D’Urville Island in the Marlborough Sounds where she proposed to spend her pregnancy. A doctor’s note speaking of a heart condition justified absence from the Chronicle and she hoped to survive financially by sending her ‘Margot’ columns. Time passed in a series of homes and boarding houses in the area of the Sounds and at Picton was, as recounted in lonely but peaceful and in beautiful surroundings. She wrote articles and letters and read books sent by John Schroder, amongst them recent novels and Montaigne’s essays; the poem published in , the remarkable ‘Montaigne on the Hillside’, was drawn from this time. However, her paper, the Wanganui Chronicle, was in financial difficulty and because of that or possibly (as she believed) because of news of her pregnancy, they cancelled her contract in early October so that by the time her baby was born, in Picton on October 29th 1930, her financial situation was precarious. Once more secrecy was involved and she returned to Wellington on the ferry, with the son she had named Derek Arden Challis, concealed in a dress-basket, to look for work. The baby was accommodated temporarily in a city nursing-home she could visit every day and she returned to the house at Northland Road. In A Home in this World she recalled the reception her family—not knowing about Derek—gave her:

In the house, then, I found myself hated: there is no other word. I had deliberately lost a good, profitable job, playing about for six months round about islands and channels. I didn’t even look appealing. ‘You look about thirty. Fat and coarse. I can hardly believe you’re my daughter’.

Unsuccessful attempts to find work were relieved by a summer holiday in Hawkes Bay with Gwen (now Mitcalfe) and her husband and son. Derek was brought along posing as her nephew. The episode seems to have reinforced Hyde’s ambivalent relationship with domesticity; a letter to John Schroder reveals, rather elliptically, that she was longing to get away from the stresses of housekeeping and child-caring: ‘It’s all been rather fun, but very hot and tiring, and I shall be glad to be back in Wellington. Shall put on a new hat, and some eau de cologne on my hanky, and walk leisurely through the streets thanking Heaven I am not a hot and harassed Hawke’s Bay housewife’. However, Hawkes Bay housewife or independent woman journalist was not Hyde’s immediate dilemma, rather she had to plan care for her child so she could resume her career. It was her friend Gwen who introduced her to a Palmerston North family who fostered Derek so that, when shortly after her return to Wellington a telegram arrived offering, most fortuitously, a position as ‘Lady Editor’ on a small Auckland weekly the New Zealand , she could promptly accept the £4 a week offer. She arrived in Auckland in late January 1931—this city was to be her home for the next seven years

The Observer was initially an exciting challenge, an established but dwindling newspaper owned by an elderly cartoonist, it had recently appointed a new young editor, J. G. MacLean, who had established new book review and leader pages and who—when the management proposed a lady editor to contribute to social and fashion pages and attract women readers—suggested Hyde’s appointment. Multiple roles ensued, lady editor under the name Iris Wilkinson, book and film page editor, special article writer under the name Robin Hyde, social page columnist under the name Jennifer Larch, and so on. Her first feature article, on ‘pungent’ conditions at the main Auckland gaol, Mt Eden, did so well in getting the paper talked about that ‘the prison authorities spent hours hunting through the files for a convict named Robin Hyde!’ In the Bookman page of the same issue (5 March 1931) she wrote a rebuttal of D’Arcy Cresswell’s review of , an anthology edited by Quentin Pope, exposing the literary back story (Cresswell’s controversy with the editor about his own poems). The Observer gave Hyde a new prominence—a position from which to air her views on both literary and social matters. But there was more, as a social columnist in ‘tinsel town’ she was also required to look the part in a new dress, ‘something classical in black satin,’ and a white rabbit coat.’ that ‘a furrier who stayed at that the same boarding house (in Princes Street) used to lend’. For the next few years her workload was extraordinary and her output phenomenal.

The private hotel or boarding house, Burwood, where she stayed (until at least mid-1932) was in Princes Street near the university; she had first known it as Harry Sweetman’s accommodation when she had visited him at Easter 1924. It was here also that she got to know Joe, a Queen Street pharmacist, who became her escort to dinners, theatre and other outings, and, significantly, supplied her with un-prescribed narcotics that alleviated immediate physical and mental pain but eventually contributed to her mental and physical breakdown in 1933. During 1931 and 1932 articles by Hyde appeared in The Observer on ‘the drug problem’ in which she half discloses her own predicament. Her analysis: ‘The crushing wheels of the twentieth century—overstrain, overwork, financial worry, noise, bustle—have brought about the reign of narcotic poisons.’ And then more specifically of morphine: ‘The addict usually gets the habit from being given hypodermic injections in hospital, whilst suffering from some acutely painful, complaint’ (The Veronal Menace, 28 July 1932).

Another anxiety was her son, Derek’s, welfare; in the Christmas holidays of 1931/2 she visited him at his foster home in Palmerston North, the Rattan’s ‘little smoky house’, as she described it, and a few weeks later asked Mrs Rattan to bring the baby north by train. For a few weeks Derek boarded with his mother and another young woman in her city accommodation. In this fun time Iris recalled being happy and not ‘drugging,’ but the situation was not tenable—she needed to work to support him. A foster home was found in the suburb of Mt Albert with an older couple and their elderly uncle, where she was able to visit weekly. The Hutsons had a tradition of social activism and were a solid if impecunious family who proved an ongoing support to Iris as well as to her son.

As in the last months of her life (during 1939 in London) Hyde’s mood intensified with the heightened political situation. During 1932 there was increasing social unrest in Auckland and throughout the country, demonstrations, political meetings at the old London theatre, and political discussions at Kealy’s, the Shortland St bookshop and library. Hyde paid close attention to all this, questioned political speakers, joined discussions and gained a reputation as the lady editor who would represent the underdog. Communist activist Jim Edwards recalled her concerned investigation into his trial when he was accused of being responsible for the Queen Street riots—a meeting of desperate unemployed men who overflowed out of the Auckland town hall and began breaking shop windows and looting. But she was also unwell, tired, using drugs again and struggling financially.

During 1933 Hyde had joined the Social Credit Party and had the opportunity to air her views in speeches on, amongst other topics, the hardship of women who, when working, contributed to an unemployment fund but, when unemployed, were unable to receive any social security benefits themselves. In the last week of May, while she was off work with the flu, she was reported in as speaking on this subject at a meeting in the town hall, a fact that may have exacerbated an already tense situation at The Observer where she was having many arguments with her young employer, MacLean, and her drug use must have been becoming obvious. On the 1st of June she was given notice from the paper and the next day attempted suicide by jumping off the wharf at the bottom of Queen Street. Rescued, she was arrested (suicide was illegal) and taken to the cells for women delirium tremens patients at Auckland Hospital to await a trial.

This extraordinary catastrophe was also a reprieve from financial responsibilities and became almost immediately a kind of creative opportunity: her plight drew friends and professional support, and in the hospital cell she began, for the first time in three years, writing poems again. After being remanded in court she insisted on returning to the hospital but was eventually persuaded (by Dr Buchanan the medical superintendent) to transfer as a voluntary patient to the neuropathic ward (The Lodge) at Auckland Mental Hospital at Avondale. The Lodge was a lovely commodious house that had been built for one of the first superintendents and accommodated those middle-class women considered borderline cases. Bed rest and domestic activities were the main treatment—and patients were encouraged to gain ‘insight’ into their condition. Hyde was certainly deeply disturbed; her condition included sleeplessness, hearing voices and bouts of fearfulness and weeping but would probably now not be characterised as schizophrenic as it was then.

Days after admission, Hyde’s poems began to appear in newspapers (‘’ in the on the 24th of June, ‘ on the 8th of July). As at Hanmer, the isolation and care of the hospital allowed her peace to write. However, before she could in the eyes of her doctors, participate in recovery, there were incidents of smuggled drugs, removal to the main block, the Wolfe Home, and F 7 where seriously disturbed patients were locked up, and self-discharge from the hospital. Trying to pretend that her mental condition was resolved, she visited family and friends and took a commission from the , travelling up by service car to write on the wonders of the North. However, this was a brief and unstable interim. It was at this time that Hyde first met the child poet Gloria Rawlinson and her proud mother Rosalie—who were to become important figures in her life and in keeping her memory alive after her death.

In December, the day after appearing at the Magistrate’s Court in Auckland on the charge of attempting suicide, Hyde again collapsed in a public place. This time she had an idea where to go: she asked to be taken back as a voluntary boarder to The Lodge and the care of Dr Gilbert Tothill. Her brief meeting with him had convinced her that he was someone she could trust to help her; he was to be her main psychiatrist over the years of her residence at The Lodge. He encouraged her to revisit the events in her life that preceded her breakdown and to face her demons. However, her fears of poverty, homelessness and not being able to support a child were not dissimilar from those that had brought other patients to the Lodge and made it in that sense a place of genuine asylum. Works that can be identified as composed at this time are a series of plays, one of which, , she sent to the young poet Gloria Rawlinson describing it as a ‘written when I was pretty sick,’ poems, and some short stories. The poems (many later published in The Conquerors) she sent to magazines and newspapers seeking some money for herself and her son; they share themes with unpublished material, childbirth, lost children, dislocation and near death, the search for alternative worlds. From her bedroom she wrote:

I should like to die in this room— It looks towards the West. Outside, the great bronze sickle of the dusk Mows the red poppies of the sunset clouds.

Washed up as she was in this new place, ‘bowed like a reed’ beneath the events of her previous life, love seemed to belong to other worlds; she inscribed herself as like other otherworldly prisoners and exiles, Eurydice, Persephone, or Elaine of Astolat, even Ouida’s Folle-Farine. Yet she also shows in the story ‘’ written at this time that she (or her protagonists) had always loved to play at other roles, other lives. If the ability to switch roles and speak for those ‘cut off from the living’ was at this point in Hyde’s life a kind of instability, it also marks her as a bohemian defending courageous nonconformists and exposing pretensions; a feminist both intellectual (smuggling serious comment into women’s pages) and empathetic (showing compassion for the difficulties of women’s roles, especially motherhood in poverty and isolation); and as a creative writer, a weaver of fictions and stories, narratives and poems that could save her.

Hyde’s doctors encouraged her to turn her attention away from a career in newspaper journalism with all its daily stresses (and now very probably rejection—John Schroder rejected her application to be The Sun’s children’s page editor) and to develop her talents as a prose writer and poet. Dr Tothill suggested in what must have been one of their first consultations that she should write an autobiography; by the end of February 1934 under a regime of writing in the mornings and gardening in the afternoons it was complete. This manuscript, although not published, signals the beginning of Hyde’s attempt to become a professional writer. It is conceived in book form interleaving prose and poems, a practice that she continued in the draft of (1934) a humorous, behind-the-scenes account of twelve years in journalism that was carefully checked with her lawyer before being accepted for publication in September.

Hyde occupied the only single room at The Lodge and eventually also had a study in an attic situated conveniently just above it. Literary mentors such as Charles Marris, editor of the annual and , visited her here. Marris helping her select a manuscript of poems sent off in May to an English agent A. P. Watt and accepted by Macmillan on the recommendation of poet Lawrence Binyon who commented: ‘Mr Hyde is rather lavish with words of colour . . . . But there is vein of true poetry in this collection and he ought to have a future.’ The poems were published as (1935) in a contemporary poets series.

By June 1934, now allowed three trips a week to town and an 8pm curfew, she began to make regular visits to The Observer offices and the Auckland Public Library. At the library she researched the life of 19th century utopian Baron de Thierry who had wanted to create an independent ‘kingdom’ in the North of New Zealand (the Hokianga) for her first novel . Friends noticed an astonishing transformation in her energy and mood: the novel was complete by December, by which time she was also writing regularly freelance (mainly reviews) for The Observer—expenses for herself and her son Derek’s fostering were still very pressing. In early 1935 she began another autobiographical work also dedicated and often addressed to her doctor, known as the ‘1935 Journal’ this is a diary in which (amongst other things) she describes the detail of her environment, the other patients, ideas of sublimation and transference and her own ideas for writing exercises as treatment for the mentally ill. This document is full of humour, liveliness and self-reflection and is altogether lighter in mood than her 1934 autobiographical manuscript.

Hyde’s determination to make her living and reputation as a serious writer intensified in the years 1935 and 1936. In this time she produced some 120 new poems; completed and published Check to Your King and (a war novel); completed two drafts of The Godwits Fly and drafts of Wednesday’s Children as well as two other unpublished novels; and published short stories and articles in the Bulletin, the Christchurch Press, Art in New Zealand, the New Zealand Railways Magazine and other papers and periodicals, also submitting many of these for prizes and awards. A controversy over the accuracy of the details of Douglas Stark’s life, the real soldier and exotic figure on whom Passport to Hell was based, dogged her, but was typical of the difficulties of writing fiction in the small provincial society. In Britain where the novel was published it received enthusiastic reviews in spite of the fact there was little appetite for war books at the time and sales there meant there were few remaining copies to be shipped to New Zealand. Hyde described the novel as an ‘illustration of Walt Whitman’s line: ‘There is to me something profoundly affecting in large masses of men following the lead of those who do not believe in man.”’

At the same time she was hard at work on a very different project the ‘Sort of portrait of a dreamland as seen by a young female with not much talent for living’ that was to become Wednesday’s Children. In this novel the main character, Wednesday, is caught between down to earth misery and escape into the incredible and fantastic—an escape similar to that Hyde’s doctors counselled her against. Both these novels and (a sequel to Passport to Hell) sought to paint a full picture of the identity crisis and adversarial relations between men and women that Hyde saw as the consequence of the Great War. In Avondale Asylum alongside wards full of returned soldiers and at the Lodge amongst disturbed and homeless women suffering the consequences of domestic breakdown or lack of family support, she was writing novels that produced a narrative explanation and historical context for this mental distress. Another theme was child rearing: not much good or practiced at motherhood herself, she was filled with compassion for its difficulties—especially under conditions of poverty or isolation

1936-1937 was a period of transition for Hyde marked by a geographical and emotional shift away from the Lodge and towards her decision to pursue her career in England. Seeking independence and more quiet to write she began to take leave weekends away from The Lodge at a bach (holiday house) belonging to friends and neighbours of poet D’Arcy Cresswell’s on Auckland’s North Shore at Castor Bay. Seeking more public profile, in April, the same month in which Passport to Hell was published, she delivered an impassioned speech at an Auckland Authors’ Week (1936) asking the audience, and the country, not only to provide more money to support writers but also to give writers their lives—’We want that part of you which is unexpressed and put aside as daydreaming.’ One of the organisers of the Auckland Authors’ Week was Hyde’s old acquaintance, now cabinet minister and novelist John A. Lee; from this time on they developed a correspondence. Whereas in her letters to John Schroder, Hyde often sought reassurance and literary guidance, the epistolary relationship with Lee was from the start more equal—as they compared and contrasted their writing intentions. Towards the end of her life in June 1939 she was to write to him that they were allied in their anticonformity: ‘What makes us so grubby in the eyes of the respectable is wanting so much . . . [and] getting so much more than they say we can.’

A further acknowledgment of her new status as a writer came in September 1936 with an invitation from Downie Stewart the chief librarian at the Hocken Library in Dunedin to travel south to research the papers of another historical personage Edward Markham. This trip away from Auckland was made with the permission of her psychiatrist and with the confidence that she had a safe haven to return to. However, while her stay with the Stewarts did allow her to begin re-drafting her bio-fictional novel The Godwits Fly (with which she had been having some problems) the plan to work on the Markham papers ran into trouble and the library withdrew access perhaps because of the continued dispute about the accuracy of Hyde’s fact-based Passport. Only the poem ‘’ remains as record of this project.

A diverse journey followed: to Stewart Island, Queenstown, Christchurch, The West Coast, a holiday in Nelson and Blenheim with her mother, culminating in an aeroplane flight to Wellington. The breadth of this experience added to her sense of her self as a New Zealander and inspired many new poems. Michele Leggott summarises: ‘Ethnicity, gender relations, revisionist theology, invasions personal and historical, remembered or imagined, enter the poems as part of an increasingly self-conscious search for the “young knowledge” that will fit the person, the place and the generation she writes from and for.’

After Christmas, spent with family in Wellington (where the poem ‘’ was composed, Hyde returned to The Lodge in the new year of 1937. But the place was now significantly different for her: on the 1st of January 1937 Gilbert Tothill had taken up a position as Medical Superintendent at Tokanui Mental Hospital in the Waikato. This career advancement for Tothill was bad news for Hyde who had, as she put it, ‘lived under her doctor’s eye’ ever since her ‘bad crash’. She had for the past 4 years consulted Tothill constantly on personal, professional and literary matters, not only when she was at her most distressed and frightened but increasingly seeking his guidance as her health improved: for example consulting him when Douglas Stark (‘Starkie’) became over-attached to her; asking him whether or not she should accept writing commissions; getting him to read manuscripts and dedicating works to him. The trip to the South Island had been made with the confidence that The Lodge was sanctuary to which she could at anytime return. Tothill’s unheralded acceptance of this new position was to precipitate her also into a sudden departure. But before that she arranged to rent baches for three weeks at the deep and beautiful Whangaroa Harbour on the east coast up North. Here she finally completed the typescript of her most re-worked novel The Godwits Fly the semi-autobiographical work she had first begun in March 1935, and which had gone through several different versions as she struggled to tell a truth open or equivalent enough to her own experience. This novel is the most directly inspired by the narrative therapy that her psychiatrist prescribed. Two years later when the novel was published in England it was dedicated to:

‘Dr G. M. Tothill

This imperfect part of truth

Robin Hyde (Iris Wilkinson)

April 1939, England’

In early March, back at The Lodge, Hyde did not like the new psychiatrist assigned to her and after a disagreement with him and other doctors discharged herself and rented accommodation in Waitararua in the Waitakere ranges near Auckland where she proceeded to write the autobiographical fragment posthumously published as ; this sequence follows on from the events that closed Godwits divulging the difficult story of her second pregnancy and birth of Derek; here she also most probably wrote the traumatic ‘’ telling of over-dosing on opiates. A move to a more permanent address (another bach) back at Castor Bay (later superseded by another at Milford) saw her writing the long prophetic poem 'Nadath' and beginning on the first draft of the Passport sequel, Nor the Years Condemn. This year also saw poems collection and novel Wednesday’s Children accepted and published by Hurst & Blackett, articles published in the Observer about the possible eviction of Maori from Orakei in Auckland, and early drafts of the poem sequence ‘’ composed while on a farewell visit, in December, to family in Wellington.

With so much achievement and success Hyde was now ready to try her hand overseas. She had written about godwits, the birds that fly every year from the Southern Hemisphere back to Siberia and about her mother’s ‘England hunger’, but for her this journey was most imperatively a pragmatic attempt to extend her reputation as a writer and win a wider audience for her work. She hoped too to make her fortune or at least increase her income and to return able to afford accommodation and livelihood for herself and her growing son (now 7 years-old); she farewelled him with this promise.

The day before her thirty-second birthday, 18th January 1938, Hyde set sail on the Awatea for Sydney and from there for Hong Kong on the Changte sailing via Brisbane, Cairns, Thursday Island and Manila keeping continuous diaries and notes which were to come in handy for composition of her travel story (which became a war story) written when she got to England. The entries that remain were written in a notebook given her by Ron Holloway of the Unicorn Press. En route she wrote a poetic essay ‘’ that continued the utopian conversations of Nadath. Her plan was to take a ship to Kobe in Japan and another ship to connect with the Siberian Railway to Europe and England. However, both the international situation and Hyde’s enthusiasms intervened. In Hong Kong the passage to Kobe (she had wanted to witness Japanese culture and its courtly traditions) was delayed and Hyde spent a week in Hong Kong. This gigantic, crowded city full of refugees from the Sino-Japanese War was her first experience of a non-English culture. It inspired her to see more of China and gather material for a book. She was well aware of the international situation as regards China and Japan (the call for intervention against Japan’s invasion of China and dispute about the inaction of the League of Nations) but was extremely keen to travel into China and behind enemy lines, looking, it seems, to experience first-hand oppression in the guise of war. On the 17th of February Hyde sailed for Shanghai; as she left she prudently posted most of her literary papers ahead of her to her agent A. P. Watt in London.

The Shanghai she arrived in had been occupied by Japanese soldiers since November 1937 following months of Chinese resistance and street fighting and, like Hong Kong, was home to thousand of refugees. Not far away was the ancient city of Nanking that had suffered in December 1937 a terrible siege during which the Japanese soldiers raped thousands of women, and citizens of all ages were brutalised, tortured and massacred. Hyde was anxious to understand the political and humanitarian situation and on her first afternoon in Shanghai went on an expensive organised ‘tour’ of the battlefields. She had thought of finding employment with a local newspaper but had not understood the disruption and confusion the occupation of the city had imposed on newspapers. Her naivety and humorous interest in the exotic at this difficult time clearly irritated a number of people she met, including fellow New Zealander, the socialist and teacher, Rewi Alley (later famous as one of the very few Europeans allowed to stay on in China after the revolution). Alley was, nevertheless, very helpful: he introduced her to two women Chinese welfare workers who showed her around the city, visiting parks, markets devastated areas, children’s homes, factories, hospitals and refugee camps, and also to Anna Wong the German and feminist wife of Wong Pei Hei, a German-educated soldier who was fighting with the Chinese army in the north, with whom she stayed in a Chinese styled house in the French concession.

From here she wrote letters, articles for New Zealand magazines and the , as well as for the and , and began on many of the ‘China poems’ later collected in . Among these poems is the much anthologised ‘’—a poem that shows that the need to cross/fuse discourses is most urgently understood and communicated by those who, like Hyde, have ‘been called stranger’ in their own land

Shaking the sweet-bitter waters within my mind, It seemed to me, all seas fuse and intermarry: Under the seas, all lands knit fibre, interlock. On a highway ancient as China’s What are a few miles more, to the ends of the earth? Is another lantern too heavy, to light up, showing the face Of farers and wayfarers, stumbling the while they go, Since the world has called them stranger?

When the pro-Chinese fortnightly the offered Hyde a commission to travel to Canton and possibly further north to act as a roving reporter, she returned to Hong Kong on the 15th of March determined to get a visa. In the few days spent in Hong Kong she briefly met up with fellow New Zealand writer and scholar, James Bertram, who had himself just returned from a five-month journey in North China, spending a day with him at Macao. Like Bertram, she wanted to write a book of her journey and this was firmly in her mind when she left for Canton.

From the ‘completely Chinese city of the interior’ that she was promised she was indeed able to travel on to Hankow, where the Chinese army driven North from Naking was making a stand against the invaders, and from there closer to the front line to Hsuchow. She arrived at Hsuchow on the 1st of May 1938 where she stayed at American Mission Hospitals. On the 10th of May aerial bombardment of the city began and shortly after the railway line was cut, so that she was unable to leave Hsuchow before it was occupied on the 19th. Nevertheless she was writing to her mother at this time about the poems she was working on: ‘a longish series about Wellington, from Island Bay to your sewing-machine, and a slight one called ‘’ …They’re in Hankow, with a suitcase and my typewriter’.

In '', also drafted at this time, the recollection of her home city is coloured by the Chinese ones she has stayed in:

Ours was a city, like any city, But with more perhaps of sea and cloud, not long loved. November tar, ripening, blackened our sandals. Our city had doorways too many shut. Morning and evening, facing the rampant crimson brutes of the light, Nobody had the beautiful strength to decree ‘Leave your doors open, morning and evening: Leave your doors wide to the stranger.’

In 1937, looking from New Zealand, she had been in the business of prophecy, writing the long poem ‘Nadath’ and like many of her contemporaries haunted by the threat of yet another world conflict. In China her poems celebrated fragments and detail, not only in the search for personal healing—the close observation of one’s environment to rectify the neurotic obsession with personal ills that she recommended in her ‘1935 Journal’—but also as a way of unifying different worlds. And we may also see here the literary influence of Ezra Pound’s versions of Arthur Waley’s Chinese translations.

On the 19th of May in a letter to her young son she wrote that she was proud of being the only foreign woman journalist to ‘get as far forward’ because our ‘country is right at the tail-end of the map and we need all the restlessness and ambition we can get’. In a letter to Dr Tothill round this time, however, she expressed a different motivation: ‘After Hankow I’ll know if I’m more of a baby than anyone else and if not that will be because of your help’. This extraordinary personal test she set herself was too much for her, but not more so probably than it would have been for anyone else. On the 16th of June Hyde managed to escape from Hsuchow by walking along the railway line; after a frightening series of events including an assault (all of which she later described in ) she was taken to the British Consulate in Tsing Tao by Japanese authorities. Rest time here, a journey to Shanghai and then back to Hong Kong finally saw her in hospital and diagnosed with the tropical disease sprue. Hospitalised again briefly in Singapore, she arrived at Southampton on the 18th of September on the . She was a godwit come ‘home’ but she was very sick and it was an inauspicious time to arrive in Europe.

Needing an inexpensive place to live, Hyde soon found the English equivalent of a bach, a caravan in Kent. It was primitive and often depressing accommodation, especially as the weather became colder, but she was busy with her ‘Chinese book.’ Dr Buchanan, the Superintendent of Avondale Hospital who had always been a good friend visited her here and was concerned at the conditions. Also in November she received the first copies of her novel The Godwits, but Wednesday’s Children was selling poorly and money was tight. And poverty—not enough money for heating or sufficient food—was far worse in England than in China where there had been a certain fraternity. She particularly needed cash to buy two medicines, one a sleeping draught without which she suffered constant insomnia. In mid-December she made a move to London, to the same hotel/boarding house in Bloomsbury where James Bertram was living. In the days following Christmas 1939 Bertram was increasingly worried about her physical health and managed to get her admitted to Middlesex Hospital. However, in spite of many letters and some visitors, she discharged herself. The China book she called ‘Accepting Summer’—re-named (oddly) Dragon Rampant by her publisher—was finished but encountering some problems. Hurst & Blackett were worried about its pro-Chinese stance but did finally accept it in January. Some of the advantages of being in London were becoming apparent as Hyde met more people and became involved in various political and cultural groups—the China Crisis, the United Front and the Left Book Club. However, another spell of ill health saw her back in hospital, this time at the specialist Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London where she remained for a month. It was while here that she was first contacted by a theatrical couple wishing to adapt her novel Wednesday’s Children for the stage. She was also visited by New Zealand poet and editor Charles Brasch. Bertram, who was planning to leave London, particularly asked Brasch to look out for Hyde and the two became friends.

In March (on leave from hospital) Hyde dined with James Bertram in a French restaurant in Soho using a gift of cash in a letter from John A. Lee; they discussed China writing. (In a letter round the same time she speaks of being disappointed by Christopher Isherwood’s travel diary, though she had also met and liked him.) She described Dragon Rampant as: ‘secondarily a war book, primarily a book about people—not Consular book—or maybe a war book reflected through people.’ At around the same time in a letter to Lee she thanks him for his praise of Godwits and explains that she thinks it is because she is indeed challenging conformist morality that it was receiving some negative reaction: ‘much of the really unfair criticism . . . is based on sexual grounds. And they are quite right to attack, because though they are mostly too dumb to know it clearly, I’m attacking—and have, and shall, with luck. So though I do get hurt and squeal I haven’t a real claim to squeal’.

Hyde was now very depressed at the worsening international situation and hoping that her own country would stay out of the conflict. She was also very unsure what to do herself, whether to stay or go—many fellow New Zealanders were leaving England—and though at times she regained her health and was revising and writing new poems and articles it was hard to survive financially and the way forward was very unclear. The fine, late poem ‘ was probably first drafted at this time in hospital.

After hospital—not cured, but improved in health following transfusions and a special diet—Hyde was invited to stay at Bishop’s Barn, a country cottage in Wiltshire that Charles Brasch had been loaned for his last three months in England. She also stayed for some weeks at the Charlotte Street flat belonging to the Cravics—the couple with who she was in negotiation about the dramatisation of Wednesday’s Children. The negotiations with the Cravics did not go smoothly, and although she was pleased to be at a distance from the literary in-fights and slights of her own small country, England had the ability to generate another kind of despair: she felt more marked and excluded in England by her poverty than in New Zealand. With her left-wing connections and the publicity surrounding Dragon Rampant, which was a noted book when it was published in July, she did begin to meet the people who might have lifted her out of these constraints. There were things to look forward to: she was nominated as a representative to a P.E.N conference in Stockholm in September. The China Campaign Committee was organised from Victor Gollancz's Left Book Club and here Hyde met, among others, Sylvia Pankhurst. Famous as a suffragette, Pankhurst, following the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1936, had begun a newspaper as well as a bookshop that ran a lecture series to which Hyde contributed on August the 10th. Following the lecture, Sylvia entertained Hyde at her house and, seeing her fragility, recommended an osteopath and made plans for a friend of hers to accommodate Hyde in her pleasant house.

Hyde now was very anxious. The imperative to live in the present that was part of the mental health ‘cure’ she had achieved at The Lodge was very difficult given the circumstances. The few New Zealand friends that were left in London were sometimes wary of her extremes of emotion. Notwithstanding the comments in the Challis biography, it seems fairly clear she was returning to the self-harming and drug-taking habits of the past (see Challis/Rawlinson, p. 714). A depressing little attic room in Notting Hill that she had moved to when she left Charlotte Street at the end of May did not help matters. She had also begun to use the new amphetamine benzedrine which at the time was regarded as miracle drug for clearing the mind and relieving anxiety. There was next to no awareness of its toxicity in high doses and its other effect of increasing depression or paranoia. It was with this drug, perhaps combined with gas from her stove, that she killed herself on August 23rd 1939. In the days before her death Hyde had been visited by the New Zealand High Commissioner who offered to help with her fare home to New Zealand, in an interview at the inquest he reported that she had said she didn’t want to go home, she wanted to go back to China. China with its ‘ancient highway’ was a place where she had shown in her writing that she felt painful and exclusive differences were diffused; she always styled the way she wanted to live her life with her poetic vision.

Critical reception of Hyde’s work has waxed and waned: her growing reputation in New Zealand and Australia as poet and novelist was cut off by her death. Although most of her work was published in the United Kingdom, with Dragon Rampant achieving bestseller status and receiving positive reviews in the and other London papers in the July before she died, she remained virtually unknown there. Her dream of making an international reputation was thwarted not only by her own ill health but also by the worsening international situation—as Europe edged towards war, attention was elsewhere. Notices and obituaries in the and in the London paper the New Times and Ethiopia News and many in New Zealand papers, proclaimed the loss of a talented young writer but little or no attention ensued following her death. It was not until 1952 that Gloria Rawlinson’s edition of appeared and, although this rich collection was published by Caxton Press and editor Denis Glover, there was a general hostility amongst the new generation of poets to what was seen as Rawlinson’s sentimental and feminine presentation of Hyde’s work. Hyde’s death, perhaps coinciding with so many other wartime deaths, rather than making her a tragic figure seemed at first to have made her a rather tiresome one.

Until the 1980s Hyde was valued most for the social realism of The Godwits Fly which was continuously in print in New Zealand classics series, and for the celebration of New Zealand identity in her much anthologised ‘Houses by the Sea’ and longer poems written about New Zealand in China. This assessment was echoed but negatively qualified by Allen Curnow in his selections and introductions to the 1945, 1951 and 1960 : he suggested in the 1945 introduction that her best work was created almost by mistake and that Hyde was an impulsive writer ‘who did her best unawares’ and did not substantially alter this view in the similarly patronising tone of the 1960 Penguin. Even Gloria Rawlinson, with access to much unpublished material, tended to replicate a nationalist view. In the 1980s attitudes to Hyde’s work began to change, a feminist perspective fore-grounded her career as a journalist, her fierce independence and her previously unknown or considered-irrelevant situation as twice over an unmarried mother. Her commentary on the conformist society of the 1920s and 1930s was now seen to be manifest in her interesting and unconventional life. Quarrels over her representation and her degree of agency ensued. A 1984 telefeature Iris, about Hyde’s life, directed by Tony Isaac, one of the first on video, was criticised as sentimental and appropriative by Linda Hardy, Phillida Bunkle and Jackie Matthews in articles in magazine. The most recent critical work on Hyde has made available much new information and primary material. Hyde’s son Derek Challis has drawn on his own collection to update Gloria Rawlinson’s biography, begun in the 1950s and abandoned by her in the 1970s. A very comprehensive collection of poems has been edited and introduced by Michele Leggott. A doctoral thesis by Lisa Docherty collects correspondences with John Schroder, John A. Lee, Downie Stewart and Pat Lawlor. Forthcoming is a composite of Hyde’s autobiographical works as well as a book of essays on the writer and her work. Leggott’s work includes essays and editions of two long poems. All these and the poetry collection imbue Hyde’s work with new understanding of the events of her life and vivify their emotional intensity with special attention to how Hyde codes her love for her doctor, Gilbert Tothill. The Challis/Rawlinson biography is valuable for bringing new material to light but is less strenuous interpretively, being extremely detailed and all-inclusive. Scholarship on Hyde continues with many new contexts such as mental health and the Pacific theatre of war commanding attention.

Sylvia Ashton-Warner, 1908-1984 Emily Dobson

Sylvia Ashton-Warner was one of New Zealand’s more colourful literary figures. Her insistence on living a life of originality and flare frequently came into conflict with what she saw as a dull, conformist society. Governed by an unconventional and uncompromising personality, she cultivated a bitter ‘hatred’ of her native country, and subsequently tended to polarize opinion there. She enjoyed international repute in her lifetime as an educator, primarily in America, but also produced several novels. Throughout her lifetime Ashton-Warner found it difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction, and her novels are strongly autobiographical. Her work is occasionally marred by uneven quality and a dated representation of Maori, but in general shows a skilful control of language. While Ashton-Warner’s first novel, (1958), is still considered a minor classic, her greatest legacy is the superbly written autobiography, (1979). On the whole, however, interest in Ashton-Warner’s work has steadily declined.

Sylvia Constance Warner was born in Stratford, Taranaki, on 17 December 1908, the fifth child of eight—five girls and three boys. Throughout her life Ashton-Warner was haunted by the ghost of a first Sylvia who died four days after birth in 1905; the name and dates suggest that the Sylvia who survived was intended as a replacement child. Her father, Francis Ashton Warner, had arrived in New Zealand from England in 1877 at the age of 16 with a noble lineage (John Le Warner was a nobleman in the court of Edward III) and an impressive box of family heirlooms, but little else. After travelling the country as a manual labourer he managed to find work book-keeping in Auckland and there met his wife, feisty young school teacher Margaret Maxwell. The Maxwells were a poor Scottish family but, like the Warners, were rich in family legend. Storytelling, particularly the marvellous, exotic stories of her father, was a vital part of Ashton-Warner’s childhood. She inherited an urge to fictionalise her frequently less than ideal situation into something more bearable. In 1904 Francis was left crippled after a sudden deterioration in his health, and Margaret became the sole breadwinner of their large family. Margaret was a determined and sometimes violent woman who followed an educational philosophy of discipline and rote learning. A result of Margaret’s confrontational nature, the family came to expect trouble from school inspectors or landlords—they were often in debt—and their life was patterned by packing up and moving on. Margaret took her family to small rural schools all over the North Island, including Raupuha and Koru in Taranaki, Te Pohue, Umutaoroa, Mangatahi and Hastings in Hawkes Bay, and Te Whiti near Masterton.

Ashton-Warner was a solitary child and thought herself ugly. Her personality was to become shaped by a sense of guilt and a profound craving for love. She sought the approval of others and did well at school under her mother, who instilled in Ashton-Warner a driving ambition to be the best. When Ashton-Warner was learning to write, under her mother’s instruction, she was forced to use her right hand against her natural left-handedness. The practice was common at the time, but left Ashton-Warner with an ambidexterity that dazzled witnesses later in life. She could, for example, simultaneously write a sentence from both ends and join it neatly in the middle. Ashton-Warner also had a natural talent for art. In her final year of primary school, in addition to becoming dux, she won a prize at the Carterton Show for one of her drawings. Margaret insisted on giving her children musical encouragement; wherever they were she made sure they had a piano, and if payments lapsed and it got repossessed she went straight out and acquired another one. Music practice provided a welcome exemption from chores, and the family’s happier moments were spent singing around the piano. Ashton-Warner dreamt of becoming a concert pianist.

Ashton-Warner’s first term of high school was spent with her sister Daphne at Wellington Girls’ College, but the girls returned to Te Whiti when their older sister Grace, with whom they had been staying, ran low on finances and patience. Wellington was Ashton-Warner’s first experience of the outside world. During her time there she discovered a penchant for performing that she was to return to as a young woman. Back at Te Whiti, however, where she faced a long daily bike ride to Masterton District High School (later to become Wairarapa High), she withdrew from her classmates and is remembered as being somewhat aloof. She took refuge in the library. At her school prize-giving Ashton-Warner was awarded Mrs Scholefield’s Girls’ Essay Prize and was encouraged by the guest speaker to ‘keep on writing’. On 31 January 1926, a few days before Ashton-Warner was due to depart for Wellington as a student teacher, her father died. His death affected Ashton-Warner deeply and was one of the few things she always found too painful to explore in her writing.

Ashton-Warner’s personality blossomed in Wellington, where she boarded at the YWCA. She discovered make-up and dating, and though she tolerated teaching—a year at Wellington South School and a year at Wadestown School—she continued to dream of life as an artist or concert pianist. At the end of 1927 Ashton-Warner passed the Teachers D examination (she was marked 95% for blackboard drawing) which qualified her to attend Auckland Teachers’ Training College. Her classmates there remember her as daring and unconventional: she wore make-up, smoked, and wore exotic outfits to social events. They were charmed by Ashton-Warner’s magnetic personality, and impressed by her artistic and musical talents. Ashton-Warner attended night classes at the Elam School of Art but did not find the inspiration she had expected there. She spent the summer vacation at her sister Muriel’s house in Golden Bay, and was temporarily employed at the local mental hospital. She later claimed that she had learnt more about the human mind there than at any other time. While in Auckland, Ashton-Warner’s dreams of an artistic career gradually seemed to fall away, and, although she had never seriously considered writing to be an option, it now appeared to be her best hope of achieving something important. At the end of her second year at Teachers’ Training College, in addition to receiving an unprecedented 99% for an art assignment, Ashton-Warner won second prize for a poem in the annual student magazine competition.

Ashton-Warner had a number of boyfriends in Auckland, but felt most seriously about Keith Henderson, also a student at Teachers’ Training College. Keith, the second son of a Methodist minister, was reportedly good-looking, hard-working, and dependable. In 1930, Ashton-Warner was placed as a probationary assistant at Cornwall Park School in Auckland, while Keith—one of only two students that went straight into permanent employment—became the sole-charge teacher at Whareorino School in Taranaki. The night before Keith left he proposed to Ashton-Warner and she accepted. The couple maintained their relationship with long letters and occasional visits. At the end of 1930 Ashton-Warner became a fully qualified teacher, but the Great Depression had begun and teaching jobs were scarce. Ashton-Warner spent a happy year painting until her money ran out and she returned home emotionally drained to her mother, now in Lower Hutt. She was eventually appointed to Eastern Hutt School. Early in 1932 Keith took his fiancé to Christchurch to meet his parents. That winter, impatient to marry, he sent her an engagement ring. Sylvia and Keith were married by Keith’s father in the Methodist church in Taranaki Street, Wellington, on 23 August 1932.

The newly married couple lived at Whareorino, where Keith taught for a term before they transferred to Mangahume, still in the Taranaki region. Ashton-Warner had no interest in the domestic arts, so the cooking and cleaning duties fell to her husband. In 1935 Ashton-Warner gave birth to their first child, Jasmine. When she became pregnant again within a year there were concerns for her ability to cope and the pregnancy was aborted. A boy, Elliot, was born in 1937. Ashton-Warner began to express a wish to return to teaching—it was her suggestion that she and Keith should apply at a remote Māori School. At the time, this move was generally considered undesirable: it was not professionally conducive and usually involved a high degree of isolation. The Native Schools Service was still a separately administered branch of the Education Department; many Māori School teachers were not certificated and until 1934 were denied membership of the New Zealand Educational Institute (the teachers’ professional organization) because they were not considered to be real teachers. In choosing this path Ashton-Warner may have been seeking to regain the rural freedom she enjoyed as a child, or perhaps enjoyed a romantic image of herself working tirelessly at the frontier of civilization.

Whatever the reason, in 1938, after awaiting the birth of a second son, Ashton, Ashton-Warner joined Keith in Horoera, near Te Araroa on the East Coast of the North Island. She became a member of the Women’s Institute and learned to speak Māori, but found teaching difficult. She began to suffer from insomnia and in 1939 had a nervous breakdown. She saw Doctor Donald Allen in Wellington, who introduced her to the notion of there being two opposite forces at work in the world: survival of the individual and survival of the species. Ashton-Warner re-labeled these forces Fear and Sex, and the concept became crucial in the development of her ideas about teaching. Dr. Allen also encouraged Ashton-Warner to write as a form of therapy.

In 1940 the Hendersons moved to Pipiriki, on the Wanganui River. By 1942 Ashton-Warner, with the help of her friends and family, had cleaned up an old disused whare (dwelling) and was spending a great deal of time in it writing. She called it ‘Selah’, a Hebrew word from the Old Testament Psalms which meant, for Ashton-Warner, a pause or rest. Having such a space for herself was important for Ashton-Warner’s internal well-being. Wherever she happened to be, seeking out and claiming a Selah became a tradition she maintained for the rest of her life. In the security of Selah Ashton-Warner worked on a novel called and kept a detailed diary, which she was not afraid to embellish. She reworked material from her diary into short-stories and in 1948 the New Zealand Listener eventually accepted ‘’. Although the story was published under her married name, Sylvia Henderson, she went on to publish as Sylvia Ashton-Warner. Following the example of her sister Grace, she had adopted this name during the 1920s to distinguish herself from the other, more ‘common’ Warners of the world.

In her classroom, Ashton-Warner’s educational ideas were also taking shape. Like many Māori teachers at the time, she found the subject matter of the standard infant reading books too removed from the real-life experiences of the Māori children in her care to be useful. Ashton-Warner decided to make use of the children’s own—and often violent—personal stories to encourage them to learn to read. She produced a series of infant reading books that featured Ihaka, a young student who had made an impression on her. Ashton-Warner believed that a child’s destructive urges could be redirected into creative output, and put a strong emphasis on art, music, and dance. Her end-of-year concerts consistently made a profound impression upon both the students involved and their audience. Ashton-Warner’s creative impulse also found expression in her own increasingly pronounced eccentricities—she was once seen dancing naked in the moonlight, for example. She was notorious for her absences from school and had developed a growing problem with alcohol.

In 1949 Ashton-Warner and Keith transferred to Fernhill in Hastings where Ashton-Warner’s ideas about an infant reading method reached their peak. She sent the little books she had made to A. H. and A. W. Reed. After various obstacles had been overcome, including the publisher’s frustration with Ashton-Warner’s unpredictable temperament, the books were set to be published in 1953. More complications arose, however. The momentum was lost and the project abandoned. In 1954 Ashton-Warner submitted a new manuscript, Spinster, to Whitcombe and Tombs. Spinster tells the story of Anna Vorontosov, a sensitive and talented teacher with a somewhat mysterious past, working in a small New Zealand School and struggling with an oppressive authority. Whitcombe and Tombs saw merit in the work, but the small population of New Zealand meant it was economically risky to publish, and they suggested she try an overseas publisher. In 1955 Secker and Warburg of London accepted Spinster and Ashton-Warner retired temporarily from teaching. In 1955 and 1956 the New Zealand magazine published her teaching scheme ‘The Maori Infant Room—Organic Reading and the Key Vocabulary’ in five installments. Ashton-Warner returned to teaching in 1957, when she and Keith took up positions at the largest and most prestigious Māori school in the country in Bethlehem, near Tauranga. Teaching, however, slipped increasingly into the background as Ashton-Warner’s writing career took off.

Spinster was published in February 1958 to highly favorable reviews. The first printing sold out in a fortnight and the second within a month. Ashton-Warner signed a contract with Simon and Schuster in New York, where Spinster sold twenty thousand copies and was ranked by magazine as one of the ten best books of the year. Its New Zealand release in July was hugely anticipated and hailed as part of an exciting new wave of New Zealand novels, which included Janet Frame’s (1957) and Ian Cross's (1958). Although Ashton-Warner was not unique in her innovative ideas about teaching, Spinster took the international educational community by storm. Among her New Zealand colleagues, however, those who were familiar with Ashton-Warner’s inconsistent and often deplorable behavior in the classroom found the depiction of a lone heroine harder to accept. New Zealand critics found fault with the novel’s emotionalism and, the literary climate at the time being one of rigorous regionalism, its foreign protagonist. Despite the criticism, responses to Spinster were in large part positive. According to Ashton-Warner’s biographer, Lynley Hood, it was ‘more discussed and praised in the media than any previous New Zealand novel’.

Ashton-Warner reacted to the enthusiastic reception of Spinster in New Zealand with a compulsive need for rejection. For years she had been fostering an increasingly vehement hatred of New Zealand based on a conviction that she had been rejected by her native country. She could not cope with such unqualified acceptance and recoiled from invitations and honours—including membership in the writer’s organization PEN and an entry in . Near the end of 1958 Ashton-Warner was awarded the State Literary Fund’s prestigious Scholarship in Letters, which, after adamant attempts to refuse, she reluctantly accepted.

Ashton-Warner’s next novel, (originally titled Bachelor), was published in Britain and America in 1960, and released in New Zealand shortly after. Flying in the face of criticisms of Spinster, and flaunting Ashton-Warner’s distaste for the average New Zealander, Incense to Idols again features a foreign protagonist—the beautiful and talented French concert pianist, Germaine de Bauvais—who has somehow ended up in the middle of small-town New Zealand. In between descriptions of her love affairs and zest for fashion the novel follows Germaine’s obsession with an imposing clergyman, her subsequent moral crisis, and her eventual suicide. The book attests to Ashton-Warner’s ambivalent feelings about New Zealand, displaying both caustic criticism of a conformist and repressive society alongside intimations of the pride she felt for what could be achieved in such a small, unassuming nation. The glamour and extravagance of Incense to Idols contrasted even more starkly than Spinster with the prevalent literary regionalism, largely characterized by heaviness and cynicism. Local critics lacked the vocabulary to deal with a novel like Incense to Idols. They misunderstood its comic aspects and were deeply shocked by the gruesome image of Germaine placing her miscarried foetus into a wine glass. They were resolute in their rejection of it.

Ashton-Warner made a solo trip to Sydney in 1960, with the intention of staying a month. She found the media attention overwhelming and frightening, however, and returned home after only a few days. Meanwhile, Spinster, the rights of which had been bought by Metro Goldwyn Meyer, was filmed in Hollywood. The original plan had been to film in New Zealand but this was prevented by the other movie commitments of the actors, Shirley Maclaine, Laurence Harvey, and Jack Hawkins. Ashton-Warner was disappointed by the movie. The fact that her forty-something Russian heroine had been transformed into a Pennsylvanian girl in her twenties particularly bothered her.

Ashton-Warner’s other pursuit that year was to have her teaching scheme published as a unit. Her New Zealand distributor, Bill Moore at William Heinemann, took on the project and put a great deal of effort into it. The process was at an advanced stage when Ashton-Warner characteristically sabotaged it, sending the material—cartons of unsorted papers—to her New York publisher, Bob Gottlieb. The resulting book, (1963), included an introduction that made loud, bitter, and unfounded claims about Ashton-Warner’s persecution at the hands of New Zealanders, and in particular of the New Zealand Education Department officials. Ashton-Warner also continued to frustrate her New Zealand readers by cancelling interviews and appearances at the last minute. The New Zealand public, feeling betrayed and attacked, was becoming increasingly disillusioned with Ashton-Warner. Teacher, consequently, did not make a very significant impact on the local literary scene. For Americans interested in alternative teaching methods, however, Teacher was seen as humane and creative, its author a hero. Ashton-Warner hosted various Americans visitors at Bethlehem. Though delighted with their host’s charismatic personality, they were generally disappointed by the lack of educational innovation at her own school. In February 1963, shortly before the publication of Teacher, Ashton-Warner and her husband Keith had the honor of dining with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on board the H.M.Y. Brittania at Napier.

In 1964 Ashton-Warner worked on , a novel which depicted a complicated web of relationships based on the author’s own passionate internal love affairs. It failed to impress Bob Gottlieb and was never published. In 1965, however, Gottlieb published a new Ashton-Warner novel, . Although perhaps the least autobiographical of Ashton-Warner’s work, its characters were recognizable, drawn from a family the author knew. Set in a semi-rural New Zealand community, the action of Bell Call is centered around the local school but never explicitly within it: distinguishing the novel from Spinster while benefiting from Ashton-Warner’s intimate familiarity with this environment. The bizarre anti-establishment activities of the artistically oriented Tarl and her young family are observed by the novel’s protagonist, the writer Dan. The novel is a spare representation of ordinary New Zealand life, interwoven with an intricate exploration of what it is to be a writer. Ashton-Warner resisted the New Zealand release of Bell Call—possibly she feared legal action from the family involved—and it was not until 1971, with the book’s British acceptance, that New Zealanders were able to read it. The delays in publication, the poor reception of Incense to Idols that preceded it, and the public’s general disillusionment with Ashton-Warner resulted in a critical neglect of Bell Call.

In 1966 Bob Gottlieb published two more Ashton-Warner novels, and , both set in Pipiriki. Based on her childhood and transplanted there, Greenstone is the second part of one of Ashton-Warner’s earlier projects, the three-part novel, . Featuring a romantic, crippled father and a dominant, violent mother, Greenstone reveals the bizarre circumstances of Ashton-Warner’s upbringing. Myself, though claiming on the dust-jacket to ‘hide nothing’, is the somewhat fictionalized diary of her years at Pipiriki. It presents her increasingly fervent theories about the artist and the creative drive. Again, Ashton-Warner resisted the New Zealand release of these books—she was worried about the depiction of her mother in Greenstone and of a close friend in Myself. During the late 1960s Ashton-Warner’s reputation in New Zealand underwent a sharp decline, and the local critical community paid scant attention to her latest two novels. Greenstone was attacked for its dated portrayal of Māori.

At this point in her life, in keeping with her much-voiced ‘hatred’ of New Zealand (and despite the entreaties of the New Zealand National Librarian), Ashton-Warner decided to donate her accumulated papers to the Boston University library. She was by now suffering the affects of heavy alcoholism, a lifetime of chain-smoking and strong tea-drinking, and a dependence on codeine and sedatives. In 1966 her husband Keith’s health began to deteriorate and a cancerous bladder was removed at Auckland Hospital in 1967. Despite the assurances of his doctor, Keith’s condition did not improve, and he died on 7 January 1969, age 60. As headmaster of Bethlehem School, Keith had earned the respect of the Māori community and he was honored with the only tangi ever held for a Pakeha without marriage ties to Ngai Te Rangi. Ashton-Warner wore bright green.

With Keith no longer there to take care of her, a lifetime of escapist fantasies became an imperative reality for Ashton-Warner. She left the country on 29 March 1969 and was met in Mauritius by her son Elliot, his wife Jacquemine (the eldest daughter of a noble French family who had fled to Mauritius during the French Revolution), and their son Vincent. Despite Ashton-Warner’s initial enthusiasm for her exotic new surroundings, the novelty soon subsided. Six weeks before Keith died, Ashton-Warner had been invited to help set up a Rotary-sponsored peace school in Israel, and she made this her next destination. After a week-long stop-over in Bombay (now Mumbai), which she spent visiting schools, Ashton-Warner arrived in Tel Aviv—the city still bore the frightening presence of the 1967 Six Day War. She was well looked after by the chairman of the project, Wellesley Aron, and his wife, but perplexed her hosts with her contradictory character: she was ingratiatingly pleasant and obliging in person yet resolutely uncooperative over the work she had been consigned to do. An urgent cable from London provided her with the excuse she needed: her son Elliot was extremely ill. He had picked up an amoebic infection of the gut in the tropics, and it had spread throughout his body. Faced with the possibility of losing her son only added to the emotional and physical strain Ashton-Warner had been under since her husband’s death.

Although Ashton-Warner lost hope for his life, Elliot’s health did eventually improve, and he was able to move back into his Clapham flat to recuperate. Ashton-Warner stayed on in the flat—ostensibly to assist her son’s recovery though she spent the majority of her time writing. Elliot’s wife Jacquemine also remained, despite tensions in their marriage. They shared the flat with an actor friend of Elliot’s. The living arrangements were strained, but provided ample material for the new novel that Ashton-Warner was working on. She changed the names and occasionally departed into fiction to make the plot more interesting, but essentially, the manuscript was a direct account of her time in the flat, and exploited the tensions in the mother, son, and daughter-in-law relationship. It was also an intimate and moving portrayal of a woman recovering from the recent loss of her husband and her son’s brush with death, and her subsequent struggle with grief, shock, loneliness, jealousy, guilt, and fatigue. Stylistically, the narrative shows the benefit of years of sharpening: seen particularly in the unswervingly economic use of language and Ashton-Warner’s remarkable ear for dialogue. The discovery of the manuscript created further tension among the housemates, and Ashton-Warner subsequently vowed to destroy it. It was, however, eventually published as in 1970 by Bob Gottlieb, who had since moved to Knopf. Like Bell Call, Three suffered from Ashton-Warner’s declining popularity and made little impact in New Zealand or overseas.

Ashton-Warner was experiencing increasingly severe panic attacks and a renewed, recurring desire to escape. When she received a letter from New Zealand telling her that the husband of her daughter Jasmine (seven months pregnant with her sixth child) had died, she returned home immediately. It was a difficult period: Jasmine was depressed and in poor health, her six children needed looking after, and Ashton-Warner herself was emotionally fragile. With funds dwindling she sent Gottlieb a manuscript based on her situation, but he was unimpressed. She fell into a deep depression and suffered a creative block. She was rescued from her unhappy circumstances by an invitation from a group of liberal minded parents in Aspen, Colorado, who asked her to help establish an alternative school there. Aspen had become a centre for America’s growing counterculture. Ashton-Warner still commanded enormous respect in America and was to be the school’s star attraction.

She arrived in San Francisco in October 1970, exhausted. For two days she endured a busy social program organized by her American hosts before continuing on to Aspen. There again, the reality of what she was expected to contribute was in stark contrast to Ashton-Warner’s idealized expectations. The community provided a house for her, and had raised the funds to pay her a salary (many of the people involved worked for very little or voluntarily), but Ashton-Warner was unprepared for the scale of the project and the amount of practical hard work it entailed. She considered the group’s leaders to be disorganized, and found teaching overwhelming. In addition to the less-than-ideal physical situation (the Physics Institute in which the school was housed was long, narrow, and unsuitable for the job) Ashton-Warner had difficulty relating to the American children: she strongly believed that their inner lives had been desensitised through overexposure to television. She also had to struggle with the low oxygen level of Aspen, at eight thousand feet, and the fact of her own aging body. After spending a socially exhausting Christmas in Pheonix with friends, Ashton-Warner returned to Aspen and began to withdraw from the school. At this time she was busy writing a new book, , based on her experiences there and published by Knopf in 1972. Turning a blind eye to the actual philosophies of Aspen’s free-thinking community, the book focused on Ashton-Warner’s uncompromising theories about the desensitization of Americans. Ashton-Warner concluded the book with the fictional collapse of the school. In reality, despite its teething problems, the school went on to become hugely successful.

In June 1971 Ashton-Warner had conflicting plans: she had booked a sea voyage home to New Zealand having also agreed to speak at a Reading Conference in Boulder. She characteristically attempted to pull out of the latter engagement but did eventually attend. After a last minute attack of nerves she managed to get on stage, dazzling her audience and even returning for a repeat performance. Although she continued to book journeys home, Ashton-Warner returned to Aspen, where she worked in a more agreeable role as a ‘Teacher of Teacher-Trainers’. She set up her living room as a model infant room and took groups of trainees in a ‘Key Vocabulary’ lesson. As she had done in her Māori infant classrooms, Ashton-Warner encouraged her students to find the words that held the most significance for them. Those who took part greatly enjoyed the sessions, and Ashton-Warner soon had a social network of adoring fans. After convincing them of her brutal treatment at the hands of the Aspen Community School, they hatched a daring plan for her escape—one of the trainees volunteered to drive her to San Francisco, leaving in secret in the middle of the night. Another trainee, Selma Wasserman, had suggested that Ashton-Warner return with her to Vancouver where she could take up a position at Simon Fraser University, and within five days it was all organized. In November 1971 Anton Vogt, a Norwegian-born New Zealander on the staff of the University, took Ashton-Warner to Vancouver.

Against university policy, Ashton-Warner insisted she work from home, in a similar arrangement to that of Aspen. The twice-weekly sessions were immensely popular; participants found them both unusual and invigorating. The theories were implemented in ‘The Vancouver Project’, which introduced the method into several Vancouver primary schools. Ashton-Warner’s happiness in Vancouver took a sharp downturn when several of her close friends left. She increasingly took on the persona of five-year-old ‘Mary’ (or Mere, the Māori equivalent). At the beginning of 1973 she cancelled her workshops, and began a repetitive process of resigning from the university, booking trips home, and then promptly cancelling both decisions. She also briefly ran a pre-school in her home and underwent a painful and ineffective facelift. Two of her granddaughters arrived in May to look after her. Ashton-Warner’s worsening relationship with the university eventually resulted in her final resignation in June 1973. In September she and her granddaughters set sail for New Zealand.

Back at her home in Tauranga, which she shared with her daughter Jasmine (who had since remarried) and her family, Ashton-Warner again fell into a deep depression. There were tensions in the living arrangement, particularly with her new son-in-law, and she retreated into her alcoholism. In 1974 she spent five weeks in traction at Tauranga hospital for a hip problem. Shortly after she returned from hospital Jasmine and her family moved out in frustration. Despite feeling abandoned and alone, Ashton-Warner did enjoy correspondence and friendship with several New Zealand writers, among them Ian Cross, Ruth Gilbert, Barry Mitcalfe, and Bruce Mason. Maurice Shadbolt had a memorable visit, departing with a car boot filled with Ashton-Warner’s large stash of lager. Before she left Canada Ashton-Warner had given a collection of her children’s stories and songs, O Children of the World, to her friend Dan Rubin, and although she characteristically tried to pull out at the last minute, she had signed a contract and he published 1000 copies in 1974.

For the first time (though not for lack of opportunity), Ashton-Warner agreed to participate in a feature television documentary. In January 1975 she took an assembled group through one of her trademark ‘organic mornings’ in front of a film crew. Very little of the footage was usable. Although she had initially refused to do an interview, she relented upon learning it was to be conducted by Jack Shallcrass, a friend she trusted. The resulting television program was a success. From 1975 Ashton-Warner was also regularly visited by the New Zealand film producer Michael Firth. Unfortunately she never got to see the motion picture he was working on (based on Teacher and I Passed This Way) as it was not completed until after her death.

Ashton-Warner continued to send material to publishers but was unsuccessful until she sent a portion of her autobiography—which she had been periodically working on for some time—to A. H. and A. W. Reed. She received a grant from the New Zealand Literary Fund, and for the next three years applied herself to the project with fresh vigour. After panicking about the extent to which her life was going to be exposed to New Zealanders—her ‘persecutors’—she withdrew the manuscript from Reed and sent it to Knopf. In 1977 and 1978 she continued working despite health problems—recurrent hip pain and the removal both of cataracts and a malignant growth from an eyelid—and completed the manuscript in time for her seventieth birthday. She eventually agreed for it to be co-published with Reed, and (1979) went on to win the Delta Kappa Gamma Society International 1980 Educators’ Award and the non-fiction section of the 1980 New Zealand Book Awards.

During the completion of I Passed This Way Ashton-Warner began to experience bowel trouble: a benign tumor was removed but there was little improvement. Her son Elliot returned from London in September 1980 and spent a year on sabbatical at her side. Despite her poor health Ashton-Warner enjoyed the attention that the good reception of her autobiography had generated, even agreeing to a television interview. In 1981 Ashton-Warner was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Though she had suffered a writer’s block since finishing I Passed This Way, she needed something to be working on, and the following year enrolled in a scriptwriting course with the International Correspondence School under the pseudonym Lili Williami. She gained high marks for her work throughout 1982 and 1983. In 1982 Ashton-Warner received an M.B.E. in the Queen’s Birthday Honors List. In early 1983 Ashton-Warner chose Lynley Hood as her biographer and met with her during the final months of her life. Her health deteriorated rapidly from the end of 1983, and at seven thirty on 27 April 1984, at home in Selah, Ashton-Warner passed away with her son Elliot and daughter Jasmine at her side.

(1988) went on to win the Goodman Fielder Wattie Award and the PEN First Book of Prose Award. Although the biography strengthened the small cult that had developed around Ashton-Warner’s idiosyncratic personality, it ultimately did little to stem her dwindling literary reputation. The posthumously published (1986) earned a ‘publish and be damned?’ from the New Zealand literary magazine, . In 1981 the New Zealand writer/essayist C. K. Stead had attempted to revive interest in Ashton-Warner with his essay, ‘, published in his collection of essays, . When the article was revised and republished in (2002), Stead’s introduction revealed his bafflement that his advocacy had produced no response, ‘a fact all the more puzzling when considered against the background of 1980s feminism and the determined search in universities for neglected women writers’.

Though her influence and importance are now relatively small, Sylvia Ashton-Warner nevertheless occupies a key place in New Zealand literature. Her former international fame and success was something of a phenomenon and occurred at a formative period in New Zealand literary history. Her autobiography is a substantial contribution to this country’s literature, and is of of enduring historical value with its revelations about life as an artist in New Zealand. Ashton-Warner has come to represent a challenge to a society that has been characterized by a distrust of emotion, restriction of opportunity for women, and an authoritarian control of non-conformity.

Elsie Locke, 1912–2001 Philip Steer

Elsie Locke was widely known as a peace activist and historian but she was also a groundbreaking and successful author of children’s literature. Her literary reputation rests primarily on her historical novels set in New Zealand’s colonial past, many of which have been reprinted. Attending university during the Depression, she associated with many of New Zealand’s emerging literary figures. She also became a socialist because of her experiences and observations of poverty at this time, and her many social histories reflect this lifelong conviction. The realisation that she was largely ignorant of Maori history led her to study the Maori language, and to incorporate a Maori perspective into her writing. She received several awards in her later life for her children’s literature.

Elsie Violet Farrelly was born in Waiuku, New Zealand on 17 August 1912, the youngest of six children. Her parents, William John Allerton and Ellen Electa (née Bryan), were only educated to primary level but nevertheless were progressive thinkers in the raising of their children. William grew up in Reefton, New Zealand, and while his intelligence was recognised at school he was unable to be educated beyond Standard Six. Because of this, he strongly encouraged the academic endeavours of all his children. Ellen was also born in New Zealand and, having been a teenager during the suffragette movement of the 1890s, she imparted to her daughters the value of independence and a sense of gender equality. She attended Waiuku District High School from 1925 until 1929, where she was the sole student in her class during her final two years. Farrelly always wished to be a writer, in contravention of the social norm that literate women become teachers or nurses. After winning a scholarship, Farrelly entered Auckland University College in 1930.

Entering university at the beginning of the Depression, Farrelly struggled to support herself through a mixture of scholarships and part-time employment. A seminal influence on her developing political views at this time was witnessing the demonstrations of unemployed men. As she later recalled in , ‘When the last of the ten thousand had passed me, I was left on the pavement to answer the question these men had silently flung at me: whose side are you on? Whoever you are, and wherever you are going, I am going too, I had answered’ (98).

Farrelly became increasingly interested in socialism while at University, attending meetings of the Friends of the Soviet Union and the Fabian Club. Through the Literary Club, she also became involved with the production of the pioneering literary magazine , published at Auckland University College by Bob Lowry. The first two editors of Phoenix were academic James Bertram and poet R. A. K. Mason, and its contributors included poets Allen Curnow and D’Arcy Cresswell and the founder of , Charles Brasch. While Farrelly did not write for Phoenix, she assisted Lowry with its printing and her flat became a focal point for those involved.

In September 1933 Farrelly joined the Communist Party and, after graduating in the same year, travelled to Wellington. There she soon became involved in the leadership of the local branch of the Communist Party. In 1934, with the support of the Communist Party, Farrelly began a monthly newspaper, , which ran until November 1936. It was superseded by , which ran from April 1937 until October 1939 and sought to appeal to a wider audience. Among its contributors were poet Gloria Rawlinson and novelist and poet Robin Hyde. In a later article, ‘,’ Locke argued that ‘a “second wave” of feminism came at that time and was building up when it was cut short by the war, and much of it was expressed in and concentrated around Woman Today’ (49).

In 1935, Farrelly married fellow Communist Party member Fred Freeman and she gave birth to a son in 1938. In 1936, Elsie Freeman (as she then was) convened the inaugural meeting of the Sex Hygiene and Birth Regulation Society, the forerunner of the Family Planning Association, out of concern for those families unable to cope with further children. In 1941, following a divorce, she married John (Jack) Gibson Locke, a meatworker and fellow member of the Communist Party. They moved to Christchurch in 1944 where Locke, despite her love of the country and dislike of cities, was to live for the rest of her life. They would eventually have four children. Locke spent the years 1946–1948 in hospital after contracting spinal tuberculosis, and used the time to read and contemplate her political beliefs as she learned more of Stalinist Russia and the overthrow of the Hungarian revolution. She became convinced of the need for the New Zealand Communist Party to develop a more home-grown ideology. The questions raised at this time ultimately caused her to leave the Communist Party in 1956; in ‘,’ she wrote, ‘These were times that called to faith, not questioning. I committed the supreme crime: I did question.’ (344)

It was in the 1950s that Locke first began to take seriously her desire to become a writer. Her early publications included editing (1949) for the New Zealand Communist Party, and the privately printed (1954). In 1959, she won the inaugural Katherine Mansfield Award for Non-Fiction for her essay in Landfall, ‘Looking for Answers’ (1958), where she detailed her reasons for joining and later leaving the Communist Party. It was also in 1950s that Locke helped found the New Zealand branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She served on its national executive between 1957 and 1970, and she remained committed to the cause throughout her life.

Locke’s writing career began in earnest in the 1960s when she became a contributor to the , produced by the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education. Between 1962 and 1968, she was commissioned to write a series of historical booklets, which were later collected as (1984). Comprising over seventy vignettes, ranging from short plays to the reproduction of journal entries, arranged into loose chronological order, they were intended to give children a sense of New Zealand’s social history. Some of the more prominent concerns highlighted by Locke include the occupations of the early colonisers, interactions between Maori and Pakeha, the achievements of social reformers and the experiences of children. It was while writing the series that Locke realised her lack of knowledge of Maori language, history, spirituality and attitudes to the land.

As her children reached secondary school age, Locke began writing children’s fiction inspired by her historical research. Her first book, (1965), also proved to be her most popular. The story concerns the Small family — Mary Elizabeth and her children Mary Ann, Bill, Jack, Archie, Jim and Emma — who flee Australia to escape their abusive husband and father, Stephen. They arrive in New Zealand and settle in Governors Bay, Lyttelton, assuming the surname of Phipps. They move into an abandoned cottage owned by the rich but unscrupulous landowner they first found employment with, and manage to survive through the friendliness of their neighbours and the sale of produce from their garden. While there they meet members of the local Maori village, help fight a fire when a neighbour’s scrub burn-off gets out of hand, and Bill leaves for the Otago goldfields only to return penniless. The family’s fortune is made when Mary and Archie undertake an epic journey, driving their herd of thirty-three bullocks and cows over the Hurunui saddle to the West Coast and selling them at a premium. The Runaway Settlers has been in continuous print for longer than any other New Zealand children’s book and Locke received the Gaelyn Gordon Award for a Much-Loved Book for it in 1999.

Locke turned to the past of Waiuku for her next children’s book, (1968). Her interest in her hometown had been rekindled by her work for the School Publications Branch and she spent a summer there researching the story. Set in 1860 at the outbreak of war in Taranaki, it concerns the interaction between Maori and Pakeha in the microcosm of Waiuku, a town on the frontier between the expanding settler society and the territory of the Maori King movement. The main protagonist is eleven-year-old David Learwood, who has come to Waiuku in order for his parents to work at a hotel. David has never met any Maori and his mother is afraid of the very thought, but he nevertheless makes friends with Adam, a Pakeha-Maori boy, and several Pakeha adults sympathetic to the Maori cause. He also forms a friendship with Honatana, a local Maori boy; this relationship is given extra depth by the parallel they find between David and Jonathan in the Bible. Despite the peace being kept within the village, it becomes apparent that war is inevitable and David contemplates the causes of the conflict:

Was that the root of the trouble? The Pakehas were Englishmen torn from their own land; they had not had time to know a new country with the Maori kind of love. The land was something to clear the bush from, to put to the plough, to sow down in wheat or in grass for the cattle. (203)

The novel concludes by asserting that David belongs in New Zealand by way of his continuing friendship with Honatana. It also suggests that Maori culture will endure despite the loss of the land: ‘“It doesn’t seem real, that they’ve taken his land from him,” whispered David. “I don’t think they ever can”’ (204).

For her next works, Locke turned to contemporary stories of nature. (1975) is a non-fictional book about ecology with elements of fantasy, while (1976) is a series of animal stories. (1976) is a novel about the tramping adventures of two teenagers, Tom Travers and Lou Callen, in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. Lou is struggling with a sense of inadequacy instilled by his disappointed father, whose wish that he become an All Black was been thwarted by his small size. Through six episodes, Lou develops from an enthusiastic but unskilled novice under the influence of the more experienced Tom, the awe-inspiring but merciless landscape they tramp in, and the beauty of the wildlife within it. At the end of the novel Lou begins to grow taller.

In 1978, Locke published , a short book for young children. Set in South Canterbury in the 1920s, it describes the adventures of eight-year-old Zach and his dog, Bruce, as he leaves his parents’ farm to explore the countryside for a day. Also in 1978, Locke attended the Pacific Rim Conference on Children’s Literature in Vancouver, Canada. Following that meeting she published an article, ‘’ in the New Zealand Listener (1978) arguing for the establishment of a children’s book foundation:

The eternal problem for our publishers is our small home market…. If some of our authors appear rather too wedded to the English tradition, it is not only because of literary influences, it is also because an English publisher may be seen as essential for launching the book, either directly or in a deal with a local firm. (61)

Three years later Locke published an autobiographical account, (1981), which recalled her childhood and university education.

Locke’s next children’s novel, (1983), marked a return to historical themes, centring on the story of the Wairau confrontation of 1843. The main protagonist, Gilbert (Gibby) Banks, is a fifteen-year-old from Nelson who is hired by the New Zealand Company as a cook for the party that is to survey the Wairau plain. He forms a friendship with Will Morrison, a Scot who opposes the actions of the Company but is forced to work for it due to economic necessity. As he observes:

Havers! The English gentry, they canna’ bring themselves to think they might meet their match in a tattooed Maori. They’re so well filled with the belief that their ways are the best on earth, they dinna seek to ken the ways of other folks. Little enough do they understand the Scots after two centuries under the same line of kings. (137)

In contrast to the Company’s dogmatism, the Maori under Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata oppose the survey through passive resistance. Confrontation proves inevitable, however, when the settler leadership determines to arrest Te Rauparaha yet the settlers prove to be unprepared and are outmanoeuvred when they finally precipitate a conflict. Will narrowly escapes, and is later found by Gibby who had been staying at one of the closest settlements. While Will is ultimately reunited with his son and Gibby is able to join him on their farm, the novel’s sense of lost possibilities remains: with local Maori fleeing possible wrath from the Pakeha government, ‘The beautiful church, so lovingly built, would be left to decay in a village deserted for ever’ (180).

In her final historical novel, (1984), Locke turned to the eruption of Mount Tarawera and the destruction of the famous Pink and White Terraces in 1886. The novel is set in the village of Te Wairoa and focuses on the friendship that forms between Lillian, whose mother works at a local hotel, and Mattie, who is visiting from England with her wealthy parents. While crossing Lake Rotomahana to see the Terraces, led by the Maori guide Sophia, they see a carved canoe that is believed by Maori to be an omen of disaster. Several nights later the mountain erupts, and both Maori and Pakeha inhabitants of the village struggle to survive. After the eruption, Sophia presents the two girls with sets of poi that symbolise their new relationship to New Zealand and the Maori:

‘They speak with different voices, these pois,’ said Sophia. ‘For you, Mattie, the charm is in music and rhythm and a glimpse of a far-away country. For you, Lillian, a little of the Maori spirit has entered your heart. Perhaps they will lead you to another marae where you will learn to use them.’ (199)

Also in 1984, Locke’s booklets for the School Publications Branch were collected as .

From the mid-1980s, Locke began to gain official recognition for her literary achievements. She was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature by Canterbury University in 1987 for her contribution to history and literature. The next year, she published (1988). Four years later, she published her major historical work, (1992), described by historian Hugh Laracy in (May 1998) as ‘a reference book of enduring value … without relinquishing the power to disturb and persuade at the same time as it informs’ (30). By this point, Locke was spending most of her time caring for her sick husband, and her final children’s book, , was published in 1995. It is the story of Joe, a man who hatches a rook in his hand. The bird, which he names Ruby, proves to be eccentric and intelligent and the story describes their developing relationship.

In 1995, Locke received the Margaret Mahy Award for an especially distinguished and significant contribution to children’s literature. In her acceptance speech, published as ‘,’ she listed the criteria that made a good children’s book. The first criterion was, ‘If it’s fiction, it should tell a good story. If it’s poetry, it should make the eyes shine and the ears tingle. If it’s non-fiction, it should stir a lively interest in finding out and knowing more’ (15). Locke died in Christchurch on 8 April 2001, four years after her husband.

Elsie Locke is now recognised as a pioneering children’s author in New Zealand. She was one of the first to publish novels specifically for New Zealand children, and she was an active advocate for the genre and its practitioners. Her historical novels have achieved an enduring place in New Zealand literature, remaining popular in libraries and still being taught in schools. All her writing is rooted in the New Zealand landscape and New Zealand’s history since colonisation, and that history and setting are presented to the reader through the experiences of vivid young characters unafraid to ask questions and express their feelings. These characters explore, in an understated way, the question of what it means to be a New Zealander, and the issues they face reflect Locke’s own concerns: coping with poverty; the relationship between Maori and Pakeha; the interaction between individuals and the landscape. The continual reprinting of , most recently in 1993, is evidence that her novels continue to meet the needs of those seeking children’s fiction by and for New Zealanders.

Contributors

Emily Dobson has a BA (hons) in English Literature, specialising in New Zealand Literature, and an MA in Creative Writing, for which she was awarded the Adam Prize for best folio, from Victoria University of Wellington. Her poetry has been published widely in New Zealand and she is the author of A Box of Bees (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2005). In 2005/2006 she held the Schaeffer Fellowship to Iowa University’s Creative Writing Programme. She has worked as a sometime beekeeper, postie, singing teacher and life model and now lives in rural Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, with her husband.

Carole Ferrier is a professor at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, working in the area of women’s fiction in relation to questions of gender, race, class and sexuality. Her books include: Gender, Politics and Fiction: Australian Women’s Novels; As Good as a Yarn With You; Letters Between Franklin, Prichard, Devanny, Barnard, Eldershaw and Dark; The Janet Frame Reader; Jean Devanny: Romantic Revolutionary and Radical Brisbane. She is Director of the Centre for Research on Women, Gender, Culture and Social Change; she has edited the international interdisciplinary feminist journals Hecate since 1975; and she also edits the Australian Women’s Book Review.

Bruce Harding is the Curator of the Ngaio Marsh House in Cashmere (Christchurch, New Zealand) and interviewed Dame Ngaio, as a graduate student, in her final years. He is also an educator who divides his time between teaching senior English at Christchurch Boys’ High School and working as a Research Associate at Canterbury University’s Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies (where he has acted as Chair of its Publications Committee and Working Papers Editor). He also regularly reviews for The Press and the NZ International Review and other international journals on issues related to Maori and Pasifika constitutionalism and cultures and has taught the latter for the Department of Culture, Literature and Society

Kirstine Moffat is a lecturer in English at the University of Waikato. Her research interests include colonial New Zealand fiction, early feminist writing and nineteenth-century settlement and theological discourses. She has published articles in The Journal of New Zealand Literature, New Literatures Review and Kōtare and is currently writing a book on the cultural history of the New Zealand piano, 1827-1930.

John O’Leary specializes in the study of nineteenth-century settler writing in Australasia. His articles have appeared in a number of scholarly journals, while a book chapter on Grey’s translations of Maori myths and legends is to be found in For Better or For Worse: Translation as a Tool for Change in the South Pacific (2004). Recently John was a resident scholar at the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University of Wellington.

Mary Edmond-Paul has co-edited three anthologies the most recent of which is Gothic NZ: the darker side of Kiwi culture (2005). Her critical work Her Side of the Story (1999) contains 2 chapters on Robin Hyde and her edited collection of essays on Hyde (‘Lighted Windows’) will be published by Otago University Press mid-2008. Mary is currently working on a collection of Hyde’s autobiographical writing and is coordinator of the English programme at Massey University’s Albany (Auckland) campus.

Philip Steer is currently a graduate student in the English department at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina. He is writing a doctoral dissertation on how literary depictions of the Australasian settler colonies impacted the culture of Victorian Britain by modifying narratives about imperial space, national origins, liberal subjectivity and history. He has previously completed an MA in English at Victoria University with a thesis on representations of Pakeha identity in novels about New Zealand’s colonial wars.

Joanna Woods was born in Dublin, but has been based in Wellington since her marriage to a New Zealand diplomat. During the course of her husband’s career, she has lived in Bahrain, France, Greece, Iran, Italy, the United States and Russia, where she gained her doctorate on Katherine Mansfield from Moscow State University. Since her return to Wellington in 1999, Dr Woods has been a full time writer and has written three biographies, including Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield (Penguin, 2001). She has also contributed to several publications on Mansfield and is currently writing the text for a photographic album of Mansfield’s personal possessions. Her most recent biography, Facing the Music: Charles Baeyertz and the Triad, is due to be published by Otago University Press in early 2008.