Terry Sturm: An Unsettled Spirit: The life and frontier fiction of Edith Lyttelton

Reviewed by JIM EAGLES

Ever heard of writer GB Lancaster? No? It's hardly surprising.

Neither had Terry Sturm, professor of English at the University of Auckland, until he started doing research for the Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English.

Yet she - GB Lancaster was a deliberately male-sounding nom de plume for Edith Lyttelton - was arguably both New Zealand's first professional author and our best-selling writer in the first half of the 20th century.

During that time Lyttelton published 11 novels, two serial novels, at least 250 short stories and a collection of short stories.

Several of her stories were made into Hollywood movies, including one star-studded blockbuster.

Intrigued by her huge success, and by the fact that her work had disappeared from view following her death in 1945, Sturm tried to find out more.

The GB Lancaster novels, he discovered, still occupied a solid block in many public libraries but only one had been reprinted since her death, and that was in Australia in 1985.

"As I read through them," he says, "they struck me as unusual for a number of reasons.

"They had an unusual range of settings - New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the Solomon Islands, Central America and England - and a constant theme: the nature of new societies emerging in the wake of 19th century colonialism.

"Most of the books were narratives of action and adventure, located in remote regimes of various colonies, and it was unusual for a woman to be writing in such an obviously male genre.

"There was much in them that celebrated the pioneering spirit in predictable ways, but they also seemed increasingly to question the colonial enterprise, especially through the voice of a number of memorable female characters in the later books."

But when Sturm tried to find out more about the author he discovered that, apart from GB Lancaster's real name, there was almost no information on the public record.

Finally, one of Lyttelton's overseas publishers gave him the address of the author's niece, Margaret Garrett, living in Auckland.

She and her husband, James, had preserved a large collection of Lyttelton's papers, and James Garrett had also conducted extensive research into the Lyttelton family history.

This treasure trove provided the starting point for uncovering a remarkable story.

Lyttelton was born on a Tasmanian sheep farm on December 18, 1873, but when she was 6 the family moved to a Canterbury sheep station near Rakaia.

There she lived for 30 years, mostly being trained in housekeeping, but also acquiring a passion for writing.

Her first published writing is thought to be a poem - Is Life Worth Living? - written when she was 12 and published in the local weekly Otago Witness.

At the age of 14, Lyttelton won first prize for a Christmas story sent to the same paper - apparently to the great embarrassment of her family.

While still a teenager she began to sell her stories to the glossy magazines that were starting to appear, recalling later: "I wrote a story and sold it for £5, and I bought [Mum] a sewing machine with the money, and I was so proud, for it was the first money I had of my own."

Those two consequences of her writing - family embarrassment and earning money - were to be major factors in her life thereafter.

On the one hand her family, and especially her mother, considered it quite unacceptable for a woman to write for publication.

Frederick de la Mare, a longstanding family friend, said in an address on the author in 1934 that "even the closest friends of the family knew the secret [that she wrote] in strictest confidence ... The consternation of the family is still a devastating memory."

On the other hand, as the family fortune declined, Lyttelton's father died and the sheep station was sold, writing became the principal source of income for Edith, her mother and her sister, Bing.

Sturm's research makes it clear that the stories she wrote were carefully targeted at the most lucrative markets, which, at that time, were the short story magazines.

She put considerable effort into negotiating payments for her work, in particular getting herself elevated from the poorly paid authors who wrote makeweight stories to the better remunerated stars whose work featured on the covers.

Yet the family's reliance on this source of income seems to have made no difference to her mother's attitude.

Of her early career, Lyttelton wrote: "The trouble was to find time as my mother really believed that writing (my type, anyway) was indecent for a girl, and honestly thought it her duty to keep me so busy at other things [mainly housework] that I often never got hold of a pen for weeks."

But even after the family moved to London and Lyttelton became well-established as an author, "Mum always said I could meet my [literary] friends in town but she wouldn't have them in her house ...

"Just once when I took Bing to a publishers' dinner at the Lyceum Club, she was in hysterics when we got back ... So we gave up."

Through all that, though, Lyttelton continued writing and from time to time visited the far-flung places where she set her stories.

After her mother and sister died, the habit of travelling intensified - she led what Sturm describes as "a restless wandering life" and "rarely stayed in any one place for more than a year".

In her final 20 years, Lyttelton lived in England, New Zealand, Australia, Europe, the United States, England again, did another term in New Zealand and Australia, Canada, Norway and finally, when prevented from travelling by the outbreak of World War II, England again.

Her final years were possibly her most productive as she wrote what are generally considered her three finest novels: Pageant, set in Tasmania, Promenade, centred round a Canterbury sheep farm, and Grand Parade, based in Nova Scotia.

These achieved extraordinary success yet, typically for her tragic life, this produced neither comfort nor happiness.

Lyttelton died in London in 1945, living in what Sturm describes as "conditions of appalling physical privation", while desperately wishing to get back to New Zealand.

Then, as what she would doubtless have seen as the final blow, her work rapidly vanished into the remainder sale of history.

She was dismissed by the literary elite because she wrote popular fiction primarily for money, overlooked as a New Zealand author due to her peripatetic life and the wide range of settings for her stories, and forgotten as literary tastes changed in the post-war era.

This book may go some way towards reviving interest in a remarkable woman whose writing offers intriguing insights into the impact of colonial life in several countries, and who clearly deserves to be remembered as one of the most successful pioneers of New Zealand writing.

It is a pity that Sturm's rather dull style fails to match either the colourful writing or the fascinating life of his subject, but his 15 years of research into her life have certainly uncovered a wealth of information that might otherwise have been lost.

* Terry Sturm: An Unsettled Spirit: The life and frontier fiction of Edith Lyttelton (GB Lancaster)

* Auckland University Press, $44.99