Obituary: Sarah Campion Alpers

Author and activist. Died aged 96.

Sarah Campion's last book - published last year - was a collection of articles she had written for Home and Building in the 1950s.

The lively, observant essays reveal a woman of wit, style and insight. Though now nearly 50 years old, they are still fresh and relevant.

Born Mary Rose Coulton in 1906, a daughter of the formidable and self-centred Cambridge historian G. G. Coulton, she found a vocation in writing and changed her surname to that of her favourite Elizabethan poet, Thomas Campion.

Sarah Campion was the nom-de-plume under which she wrote most of her work. This included 13 novels and a portrait of her father.

In the 1950s she married the New Zealand author and Katherine Mansfield biographer, Antony Alpers. This union brought her to New Zealand in 1952. She made the country her own, living in Devonport and becoming involved in numerous radical causes.

She had always been a dissenter. Her battles with her father prepared her for a life of questioning injustice, war, racial inequality and ecological destruction. She was a founder of the Citizens Association for Racial Equality (CARE) in 1965.

She worked against war in Vietnam and for the environmental group Friends of the Earth. In her earlier life she had protested against the fascist cause in the Spanish Civil War and had, while teaching English in Germany in the early 1930s, refused to reveal the names of her mainly Jewish pupils to the Nazis.

She was expelled from Germany and travelled, particularly to Australia. There she worked as a bush cook for a station in the Atherton Tableland and gathered the experience for her best known set of novels, the Mo Burdekin trilogy.

Her marriage to Alpers and her home on Auckland's North Shore had placed her firmly in a New Zealand literary circle, but her contacts with her English past remained important.

She had known Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, the economist J. M. Keynes and many others. Their libertarian ideas influenced her for the rest of her life.

She is survived by her son, Philip Alpers, and her grandson, Ben.Denys Trussell