Paula Morris on her search for the iconic writer Robin Hyde

Remnant of Oruawhata Chasm, Government Gardens, Rotorua Museum of Art and History in the background (former Bath House), 2020. Photo by Haru Sameshima

This July, in the short wintry break between lockdowns, my husband and I visited Rotorua. My family spent many winter holidays in motels here, visiting geysers, hot pools and the Toot N Whistle train. But this time I was staying at one of the city's oldest and prettiest hotels, the Prince's Gate, as an investigator, not a tourist. I was looking for the ghost of one of our most iconic writers, Robin Hyde.

In January 1926, she was known only as Iris Wilkinson. Iris arrived in Rotorua from Wellington, on her first solo holiday. She'd just turned 20 and had some savings from her job reporting for the Dominion from Parliament and a little money left to her by an Australian uncle killed at Gallipoli.

Rotorua in the 20s was a thermal spa town of "private hotels", tea dances and lake excursions. Iris was there for therapeutic treatments at the famous mock-Tudor Bath House.

At the age of 18, her right knee had swollen, possibly a tubercular infection. She'd had surgeries and splints, walking on crutches for more than a year.

At first the Rotorua cure seemed to work. "Flamingo-red sunsets, tourists, heavenly baths," she wrote later, remembering "sleepy picnics among the lacebark trees". At her hotel – probably the Prince's Gate, a short walk from the Bath House – Iris met 27-year-old Frederick de Mulford Hyde. Tall, dark and "picturesque", he'd served with the Royal Flying Corps during the war. Frederick was staying in the hotel as well, the centre of attention for the afternoon-tea set, a "fluttering crowd of older women."

They began a love affair, made easier when Frederick moved out of the hotel and into an old house nearby. What Iris didn't know: that house was owned by another woman in Frederick's life. Alice Algie was almost 40, a war widow. Her late father was architect Benjamin Corlett, who'd helped design the Bath House where Iris was taking her restorative baths.

Steamy Rotorua lost its romance. Iris had another surgery on her knee and was back in iron splints. Frederick was an unsympathetic nurse and both realised their relationship was more affair than love. When Iris realised she was pregnant, she caught the train back to Wellington – and to her furious mother.

Her mother wanted a wedding but settled for dispatching Iris to Sydney to have the baby in secret. Iris and Frederick made a pact: if something happened to her in childbirth, he would look after the baby. If she and the baby survived, Frederick would marry her.

In Sydney, Iris gave birth to a stillborn son. She was allowed to look at him but not to hold him.

A few months later, when she returned to New Zealand, Iris headed straight for Rotorua, to Frederick. He'd just married Alice.

Still mourning their son and in perpetual pain from her leg, Iris took whatever drugs she could buy from every chemist in town. She was dispatched to one hospital and then another and was only saved from Porirua Mental Hospital by a sympathetic doctor who sent her home to her family. Only her mother knew the cause of her "nervous breakdown."

The baby's name was Christopher Robin Hyde. At the age of 23, when she started publishing books – poetry, novels, non-fiction – Iris took "Robin Hyde" as her writing name. Not "a pen name", she once wrote in fury to fellow writer Denis Glover, "but rather intimately associated with my private affairs".

She's best known now for her roman a clef, the novel The Godwits Fly and her blood-and-guts account of trench life, Passport to Hell, the "true, terrible story" of antihero James Douglas Stark. But Robin Hyde was also a ground-breaking female journalist and editor. While she was sometimes pitied or derided by her male peers here – including Glover and Frank Sargeson – her books were published and well-reviewed in London as well as New Zealand.

Her real-life self, Iris Wilkinson, had a harder time of it. She was a jobbing writer, moving from newspapers in Christchurch to Wanganui to Auckland. Another love affair – with a fellow journalist who was already married – led to a second pregnancy. Her much-loved second son, Derek Challis, had to be fostered out while she earned money for his keep. She worked herself into more breakdowns and spent four years, on and off, in the building she called "Grey Lodge", at the Avondale Mental Hospital, now the grounds of Unitec.

Like Katherine Mansfield — another alumna of Wellington Girls' High School — Robin Hyde died young. In 1938 she sailed off to Britain, hoping to make real money from her writing and return with enough to look after Derek.

En route she stopped in China, making her way to the front line of the Japanese invasion. Twice she walked for days along train tracks. She was assaulted and all her belongings were stolen. She saw many terrible things, described in chilling detail in her book Dragon Rampant. When she finally escaped China, she was ill with a tropical disease, as well as dysentery and anaemia. In London, just weeks before another world war began, Iris died of a Benzedrine overdose.

These days, in Rotorua, the Bath House is closed to the public. No archive at the library could help me find the house Alice Algie owned, where Iris and Frederick played out their sweet-then-sour romance. At the Prince's Gate, I climbed the creaky old staircase and imagined Iris limping along the passageway.

One night during her stay, flustered by a bad dream, Iris investigated a mystery noise outside: it turned out to be a horse loose in the garden. On her way back to her room, Frederick opened his door. He invited her in for a drink. Although by the end of the year he would be married to another woman, the name "Hyde" was to be hers for life.

Shining Land.

Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde by Paula Morris and Haru Sameshima (Massey University Press, $45) is out now.