An Unsettled Spirit: The Life and Frontier Fiction of Edith Lyttelton

By Terry Sturm

Edith Lyttleton, under the name of G. B. Lancaster, wrote over a dozen novels and some 250 short stories, mostly narratives of romance and adventure set in the remote back country of New Zealand, Australia and Canada. She was New Zealand&#39;s most widely read author overseas in the first half of the twentieth century, reaching millions of readers. She topped bestseller lists in the United States for six months in 1933 and was awarded the Australian Gold Medal for Literature in the same year. Writing first from her family&#39;s Canterbury sheep station and in the face of fierce parental opposition, she later travelled widely, researching her stories in the kon, Nova Scotia and Tasmania. She never married and, with her sister, devoted many years to the needs of her mother. Her middle age was peripatetic and lonely but produced the four phenomenally successful epic novels for which she was best known. In this critical biography Terry Sturm gives a fascinating account of the harsh experience of a gifted woman writer forced to earn her own living but struggling to move beyond the limits of potboilers to more serious work. In their wide range of settings her stories confront the legacy of colonialism in a way that questions the pieties of empire and makes her work of real contemporary interest.

By Terry Sturm

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