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

by Terry Sturm

Overview

A critical biography of the popular 1920s novelist G. B. Lancaster (the pen name of Edith Lyttleton), this book tells the moving story of her life and work. Sturm paints a fascinating picture of the harsh experience of a woman writer in the first half of the 20th century whose economic circumstances shaped much of her output but who struggled nonetheless to move beyond the limits of potboilers toward more serious and original work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781775580164
Publisher:	Auckland University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Terry Sturm is a professor of English at the University of Auckland and the editor of The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature. He was the chairman of the New Zealand Literary Fund Advisory Committee and later the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council's Literature committee.

Read an Excerpt

An Unsettled Spirit

The Life and Frontier Fiction of Edith Lyttleton (G. B. Lancaster)

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By Terry Sturm

Auckland University Press

Copyright © 2003 Terry Sturm
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-016-4

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CHAPTER 1

Forebears

The lives of Edith Lyttleton's colonial forebears, with their impeccable eighteenth-century Anglo-Scottish and French aristocratic origins, offer as pure an example of the narrative of the expansion of the British Empire as might be found anywhere in the nineteenth century, and they are unusually important in understanding her life and writing. From earliest childhood she was brought up to be strongly conscious of her family traditions, and expected to conform to the deeply conservative British attitudes, beliefs and codes of behaviour embedded in them. Even after she personally rebelled against one of the most rigid of these expectations – that women were not entitled to pursue independent careers, let alone engage in such a frivolous, if not decadent, activity as writing romance and adventure stories – they continued to shape the issues with which her imagination was most deeply, and increasingly critically, engaged. Indeed, in the three big historical novels which she wrote late in life, she turned directly to the lives of the forebears who are the subject of this chapter, and to the colonial locations – Australia, Canada and New Zealand – in which they lived.

Edith Joan Lyttleton was born on 18 December 1873, at 'Clyne Vale', a sheep-farming property at Epping, near Campbell Town, some thirty miles south of Launceston in northern Tasmania. She was the oldest child of Westcote McNab Lyttleton and Emily Wood, who had married in January 1873. Her immediate ancestry, on both her father's and mother's sides, went back to the early years of European settlement in Van Diemen's Land, which saw the emergence of a colonial landed gentry from, in many instances, the military and naval officers originally stationed in the garrisons for the overseeing of the convict settlements. One of Edith Lyttleton's great-grandfathers – Lieutenant William Thomas Lyttleton (1784–1839) – had originally gone to Van Diemen's Land as an officer in the British army garrison there. Lieutenant Lyttleton himself bore a name with a long and distinguished history in English political, legal and religious life, associated especially with the counties of Worcestershire and Shropshire, and first recorded in 1161 in the period of Henry II, according to a Notebook written by his son, Edith's grandfather, in 1843.

In an article on the historical background of her Tasmanian novel, Pageant (1933), Edith Lyttleton described such 'stiff-necked adventurers' thus:

One of my great-grandfathers came to Tasmania with his regiment at the time when England sent all her convict-refuse there and a large military encampment was needed. Two more came like Major Sorley and Captain Comyn in Pageant, bringing their servants, their families, their stiff military punctilio, and settled down in the wilderness to be thorns in the flesh of each succeeding Governor who persisted in looking on the Colony as a convict settlement only, while the pioneers preferred to consider it as their own oyster to be opened at will.

Lieutenant Lyttleton met Edith Lyttleton's great-grandmother, Ann Hortle (1797–1884), in Van Diemen's Land when he was posted there in 1810, and married her in 1812 when she was only fourteen years old. She had been born at Sydney Cove in 1797, and her father, James Hortle, a private in one of the earliest convict garrisons, died in 1808 at the hands of an Aboriginal spear when she was still a child. Ann Hortle and Lieutenant Lyttleton had nine children, five of whom died in childbirth or infancy; a sixth died at the age of eighteen. Westcote Whitchurch Lewis Lyttleton, Edith's grandfather, was their fourth child, and was born in Ceylon in 1818, where Ann accompanied her husband (after his regiment left Van Diemen's Land in 1814) until, after further service in England itself, he retired from army service in 1825.

At this point (like the Comyns and Sorleys in Pageant) the Lyttleton family 're-emigrated' to northern Van Diemen's Land, near Longford, where they built the stately home 'Pinefields' (using convict labour), and where Lyttleton spent some time as a magistrate at Launceston before returning to England with his wife in 1835. He died there in 1839, and Ann returned to Tasmania yet again, outliving her husband by forty-five years (until 1884) and in later years living near Longford with Maria, the only one of her daughters to survive childhood. Great-grandmother Ann (Hortle) Lyttleton is the only grand- or great-grandparent Edith Lyttleton herself is ever likely to have seen, or retained any personal memories of, during the first six years of her life (1873–79) when she lived at Clyne Vale, which was near Longford.

Given the extraordinary vicissitudes of Ann Hortle's long life, it is likely that she contributed a great deal to the portrayal of Madame Comyn, the formidable, highly intelligent, worldly-wise Tasmanian matriarch of Pageant. Madame Comyn's French aristocratic ancestry, however, links her more immediately to Edith Lyttleton's great-grandmother on her mother's side, whose history was at least as colourful. Marie Hyacinthe Geneviève de Gouges (1794–1854), at the age of sixteen in 1810, was literally captured by Captain William Wood on the island of Guadeloupe in the West Indies, where Wood was a member of a British expeditionary force during the Napoleonic Wars, and where the ship on which she was travelling back to France was seized. Shortly afterwards they met at a ball given by the governor of the island, a whirlwind romance ensued, and they were married ten days later. Marie de Gouges had a very patrician French ancestry. Her father was a French aristocrat and general who survived the Revolution (escaping into exile) and was later appointed Governor of French Guiana by Napoleon (presumably this was the reason for his daughter's presence in that part of the world). Her father's sister, Anne de Gouges, was less fortunate, as Edith Lyttleton herself pointed out in an interview about Pageant, though she mistakenly refers to Anne de Gouges as her great-grandmother's mother, instead of her aunt:

My great-grandmother's [aunt] was lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette and guillotined the same day. Her name stands next the Queen's in the list of the Chapelle Expiatoire in Paris. She was related to the king, and her [niece] brought out to Tasmania many royal gifts, such as I allude to in Pageant. ... Like Madame Comyn, my great-grandmother also put her jewels in white satin slippers behind the cedar panelling when bush-rangers came. Also like Madame she had a large room built to which the ladies walked along the verandah protected by the pistols of the gentlemen.

After his marriage Captain William Wood fought at Waterloo, and retired from the army in 1824, emigrating with his family in 1829 (like the Lyttletons) to take up a 2000-acre grant of land at Snakebanks in central Van Diemen's Land. 'Maintaining a good deal of style with the help of assigned servants and convict labourers', he developed and expanded this property into the Hawkridge estate, eventually building the stately house, Woodleigh, where he lived until his death in 1864, surviving his wife, Marie de Gouges, by ten years.

Edith Lyttleton's maternal grandfather, Louis Mabille Wood (1823–?1856) was the second of William and Marie (de Gouges) Wood's five sons, and married Anne Flexman (1823–65), a lieutenant's daughter described by her father-in-law, Captain Wood, as 'a very clever, well-educated woman', in 1845. They had seven children in as many years, the fourth of whom – Edith Lyttleton's mother, Emily – was born in 1848. Whether Mabille Wood had the kind of romantic past attributed to the fictional Mab, Madame Comyn's son in Pageant, is unknown. He engaged unsuccessfully in small-scale land speculation and on numerous occasions tried his luck (like Mab in the novel) on the goldfields. Edith Lyttleton never knew him, and her mother Emily was only eight in 1856 when he disappeared without trace at the age of thirty-one in the Goulburn River area of Victoria where he was looking for gold. Perhaps at least part of the insecurity Emily Wood later felt, which became an extreme possessiveness towards her two daughters (Edith and Emily), can be traced to this early experience of the disappearance of her father. Furthermore, Emily Wood's mother Anne (Flexman) Wood, who had been left with seven children under the age of eleven when Mabille disappeared, herself died only nine years later at the age of forty-two when Emily was seventeen.

If on her mother's side Edith Lyttleton's ancestry was English and French, on her father's (Lyttleton) side she was also strongly connected with the Scottish-derived land-owning and political élite which had founded Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada, in the 1760s and after. Her father, Westcote McNab Lyttleton, born in Ireland in 1846, grew up in Halifax, and his second name was an acknowledgement of the powerful Nova Scotian family with which her grandfather (Westcote Whitchurch Lewis Lyttleton, 1818–86) had become connected when he married Joanna McNab (1816–1908) there in 1842. Joanna McNab's father, the Honourable James McNab, in addition to inheriting McNab Island (purchased by the first Nova Scotian McNab, in 1782) at the entrance to Halifax Harbour, was a member of the Legislative Council, Receiver General of Nova Scotia, Commissioner of Railroads and Lighthouses, Treasurer of the Province, and a Lieutenant-Colonel in the First Militia.

Like his father before him, Westcote Whitchurch Lewis Lyttleton joined the British Army, purchasing a commission in 1837 at the age of nineteen, and eventually reaching the rank of captain in 1845. Presumably during the period when he met and married Joanna McNab (1842), he had been posted to Halifax. When his son Westcote McNab was born in 1846, he was in Ireland. In 1849 he retired from the army and for ten years lived on a portion of McNab Island sold to him by Joanna's father. However, shortly after a fire destroyed the family house in 1859, the Lyttleton family sold their property to the government and travelled to Tasmania, and in 1863 Westcote McNab, then aged seventeen, began an apprenticeship as a cadet farmer in New South Wales. His father was by this time a wealthy man (especially after the sale of his Nova Scotian property) and had become one of the partners in a five-man property-owning syndicate, R. Q. Kermode and Company, which bought substantial property in Tasmania as well as in Canterbury, including (in 1861) the 20,000-acre sheep station, Rokeby, some forty miles south of Christchurch on the southern side of the Rakaia River near Ashburton.

Rokeby's first owner was James Wemyss, who purchased the run in 1853 and named it Bamstead (or Barnstead) Down, then sold it to Charles and James Cogle in the late 1850s, who in turn sold it shortly afterwards to the Kermode syndicate. By the 1860s the mid-Canterbury pastoral interests owned by the Kermode syndicate (among whose members was G. H. Moore) included, in addition to Rokeby, Moore's own prestigious Glenmark station (58,000 acres) in North Canterbury and the Wakanui station (60,000 acres), part of which adjoined Rokeby and stretched eastward from Ashburton to the Pacific coast. In 1878 W.W. L. Lyttleton purchased the interests of the rest of the syndicate in the Rokeby station, assuming outright ownership of it. It seems clear that Edith Lyttleton's father, Westcote McNab, during his years as a cadet farmer during the 1860s in the hard school of outback New South Wales, was being groomed by his parents to take over the management of the Canterbury property. There were two other brothers, one of whom took up medicine as a career, the other following the family tradition of a military career, though he died in England at the age of thirty.

W.W. L. Lyttleton himself was largely an absentee member of the Kermode syndicate during the period when it was accumulating its property interests. (In 1863 it was his mother, the redoubtable Ann (Hortle) Lyttleton, then in her mid-sixties, who visited Rokeby on a tour of inspection with other members of the syndicate, presumably to look after her son's business interests there.) For most of the later period of their lives he and his wife Joanna pursued a life of leisured travel in Europe and elsewhere. In 1870 they were residing in Dalkeith, Scotland, and in 1873, the year of his son Westcote's marriage to Emily Wood, they were in Devon. When he died in 1886 they were at Keswick in the Lake District, and Joanna, who survived her husband by more than twenty years, died at Inverness, Scotland.

After his marriage to Emily Wood in 1873, Westcote McNab Lyttleton managed the Clyne Vale property in northern Tasmania (owned by another member of the Kermode syndicate, James Crear) for some six years, during which two other children were born after Edith in 1873: Emily Hugonin Lyttleton (known as Millie or Bing) in 1875, and Westcote Raymond (Ray) in 1877. In 1879, however, the year after his father had taken over sole ownership of Rokeby, Westcote shifted there with his young family to become manager, taking up residence in 1880. At this time Edith was six. In the following year, the fourth and last child, George Clyne Lyttleton (Clyne), was born. The 1880s, during which Edith Lyttleton with her sister and two brothers grew up on the Rokeby station, were prosperous years. The run carried 8000 sheep, and Westcote gained a reputation in merinos, often winning prizes at the Ashburton show. However, signs of the vulnerability of the run to unstable climatic conditions were also apparent, and Rokeby gradually diminished in size as blocks of the original run were subdivided into smaller holdings and sold. In 1886, when W. W. L. Lyttleton died, it was suffering from a severe drought. Ownership of Rokeby went to Westcote McNab and his surviving brother (then practising medicine in Melbourne), who then sold his share to Westcote's heirs (that is, his children), thus leaving Rokeby entirely in the hands of Westcote and his immediate family. In 1886, however, an additional family connection was established when Emily (Wood) Lyttleton's oldest brother James Henry Louis Mabille Wood (Edith Lyttleton's 'Uncle Louis') came to Rokeby to assist with the management of the station.

From the time she came to New Zealand as a six-year-old in 1879 ('in the immaturity of socks and strapped shoes' as she once put it, describing a photograph of herself at the time), Edith Lyttleton lived at Rokeby for nearly thirty years. In the 1890s, however – whatever public appearances the family kept up – the fortunes of the station began to deteriorate, hit by a series of disastrous seasons and by the continuing effects of the economic depression of the 1880s, and crisis hit the family in 1897 when Westcote died at the still relatively young age of fifty. Edith's brother Ray, then aged twenty and training to be an engineer, had to put his career on hold and return to assist with the management of Rokeby. 'To some extent [he] retrieved the family fortunes', wrote Frederick de la Mare (a close friend of Ray and the Lyttleton family), and in 1908 the remaining freehold portion of the original station could finally be sold. In the following year Edith Lyttleton (then aged thirty-five) travelled to England, in the company of her mother, her sister, and Ray. The youngest member of the family, Clyne, by then established in a career in the New Zealand Customs Department, stayed in New Zealand.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from An Unsettled Spirit by Terry Sturm. Copyright © 2003 Terry Sturm. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
Part One: Beginnings, Tasmania and New Zealand 1873–1909,
ONE Forebears,
TWO Life at Rokeby,
THREE The Emergence of the Writer,
FOUR The Early Fiction,
Part Two: The Middle Years, London 1909–25,
FIVE Starting Again: London via Canada, 1909–13,
SIX Literary London, 1910–14: Makeweight Years in the Magazine Market,
SEVEN The War Years, 1914–18,
EIGHT London (and Canada), 1919–25: Professionalism and its Discontents,
Part Three: The Later Years, Wandering 1926–45,
NINE Starting Again, 1926–32,
TEN Pageant and its Publishers, 1933,
ELEVEN Return to New Zealand and Australia, 1933–38,
TWELVE Nova Scotia, Norway and England, 1938–43,
THIRTEEN Last Words: Grand Parade, 1943,
FOURTEEN Last Months,
Sources,
Appendix,
Notes,
Index,