Nelson Wattie

The Expatriates by Martin Edmond (Bridget Williams Books, 2017), 328 pp., $49.99

People – such as the four men discussed in this book – get passionate about many different things, but what matters most to everyone is life itself – our own lives and those of others – and that’s where biography comes in. Once the genre is in, it stays in, despite the frequent battering it gets from brilliant critical minds. It’s true that biography is neither science nor literature, and yet neither could exist if people didn’t live first; that’s fundamental. Writers like James McNeish and Martin Edmond dive deeply into that underlying reality and report to the rest of us about what they have found. As I read them both I am sometimes troubled by a lack of rigorous scholarship that would characterise comparable kinds of non-fiction, and by the uncertainty of creativity that is also characteristic of biography, but when I have finished reading and have set the book aside, I am filled with gratitude for the enrichment of life that such writing gives its readers. [Read more…]

Jane Westaway

Polly Plum: A firm and earnest woman’s advocate: Mary Ann Colclough 1836–1885 by Jenny Coleman (Otago University Press, 2017), 296 pp., $39.95

Polly Plum was the nom de plume of Mary Ann Colclough – née Barnes – who lived and worked in Auckland and Melbourne during the period of first-wave feminism. Author Jenny Coleman suggests that her largely unknown subject’s contribution to the women’s movement, as well as to girls’ education and to countless individual women and girls, was at least equal to that of Kate Sheppard.

An article published fifteen years after her death claimed Mary Ann ‘went down to her grave a blighted woman’. Certainly her life, as Coleman recounts it, wasn’t easy: it included personal loss, public opprobrium, bankruptcy (through no fault of her own) and ill-health. She was dead by 49.  [Read more…]