Robin Hyde

"... This book brings together for the first time the best of Hyde's journalism. Alongside extracts from the now out of print Journalese (1934) are previously uncollected articles and reviews from newspapers and magazines, ranging in subject matter from the Treaty of Waitangi to the Spanish Civil War, from China in the thirties to the Queen Street Riots. These detailed and vivid accounts of aspects of New Zealand society and the international situation have an urgency with makes them relevant to us all.The biographical introduction offers a fuller picture than we have had of this remarkable writer, drawing on interviews, letters and the work itself." -- Back cover.

"[Robin Hyde] was 33 when she died, ending fifteen years of massive production as a poet, novelist, journalist and historical biographer. Her autrobiographical writing has long been acclaimed ... and the scope of her social and political commentary is becoming clearer as work is reprinted or published for the first time. But the extent of her poetic achievement has never been appreciated because there has been no full collection of her poems by which to measure it. [This] is a chronological presentation of Hyde's poems in five sections.. derived from the 500-plus poems in her literary papers and designed to show a poetic intelligence that ranges freely between sharp observatioon, virtuoso lyricism and prophetic vision. ..."--Book flap.

First published in 1938, this novel conveys the intense feelings of an adolescent in love, poetry and England. It pictures life in early 20th-century Wellington, its physical details, emotional tensions, muddle and variety.

'They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.'. The line from the Anzac verse provides the title for this novel, in which Robin Hyde shows the predicament of returned servicemen and women after the First World War. Through the story of Douglas Stark, we see the many ways in which New Zealand was failing their expectations. It was not the 'land fit for heroes' they had fought for, but a changing society moving through the tough times of the twenties and thirties.

Robin Hyde, author of The Godwits Fly, died in 1939 at the age of thirty-three. The autobiographical A Home in this World and the attached fragment 'A Night of Hell', both published here for the first time, reveal uncompromising insights into both the struggles and achievements of her life. In a direct and compelling style, A Home in this World tells of Robin Hyde's life in the decade following her return to New Zealand in 1927 from Australia after the birth and death of her first child, years dominated by her continual struggle to cope with the pressures of working as a journalist while reserving time and energy for more serious writing. The stresses of her situation were dramatically increased with the birth of a son, the result of a brief affair. When her predicament became known, she lost her job, and therefore the means of support for herself and her child. Desperately short of money and very alone, she felt alienated from her family and their 'tradition of respectability' Despair about her circumstances and concern for the welfare of her son drove her from city to city in search of a solution. In 1933 unable to cope any longer, Robin Hyde entered the Auckland Mental Hospital as a voluntary patient. As part of her recovery she was encouraged to write, and she wrote prolivically. In 1937 she ran away, to the boarding-house in the Waitakeres where A Home in this World was written. While A Home in this World can be seen as a sequel to The Godwits Fly, it has a more open style, a greater frankness. As Derek Challis notes in his Introduction, 'It is this frankness combined with the exceptional beauty and sensitivity of the writing that makes the work Robin Hyde's finest.' A Night of Hell', a third person account of her drug experiences, was written later in 1937, when Robin Hyde was living in Milford.

This man is the biggest, laziest, rottenest, most troublesome- And in the trenches he's one of the best soldiers I ever had.' Passport to Hell is the story of James Douglas Stark-Starkie-and his war. Journalist and novelist Robin Hyde came across Starkie while reporting in Mt Eden Gaol in the 1930s and immediately knew she had to write his 'queer true terrible story'. The result was greeted by John A. Lee, war veteran, author and politician, as 'the most important New Zealand war book yet published'. Hyde took the raw horrors, respites and reversals of Starkie's experiences and composed a work of literature much greater than a mere documentary of war. She portrays a man looting a dead man's money-belt and filching beer from the Tommies; attempting to shoot a sergeant in a haze of absinthe, yet carrying his wounded captain back across No Man's Land; a man recommended for the V.C. and honoured for his bravery - but also subject to nine courts martial. In its psychological acuity and emotional depth, Passport to Hell is one of the finest war books we have.