A Home In This World

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.