Charlotte Lees Evans, 1841-1882

Abstract

Charlotte Evans is among the earliest of New Zealand’s romantic novelists and a writer of popular romantic melodrama belonging to the ‘Pioneer Period’ of 1861–1889 in what is termed the ‘sensation’ genre (Jones 120). Evans was born in Lancashire, England on 21 September 1841 and died in New Zealand on 22 July 1882 at the age of 40 years. Evans’ full collection of published works included three novels, of which the first, a story entitled Guy Eversley was serialised in the North Otago Times and Waitaki Reporter in 1865-66. This publication was then followed in 1874 by the two novels: Over the Hills and Far Away: A Story of New Zealand and A Strange Friendship: A Story of New Zealand. Evans also produced three short stories: A Narrow Escape, Only a Woman’s Hair and Our Nearest Neighbour that were published posthumously in 1900 and 1903 by a London publication called The Family Herald. A selection of her poetry, also collected posthumously, were to be eventually published by her husband Eyre Evans in 1917. It is largely unknown, however, as to what extent Evans’ novels were read, either in New Zealand or overseas. Copies of the first editions of her published works are now held in the National Library of New Zealand and Oamaru Public Library collections, along with a miscellaneous collection of prose and poetry entitled ‘Fragments of Poetry and Prose’ (ATLMS-Papers-4426). Evans’ two major works, the novels Over the Hills and Far Away and A Strange Friendship were both published in 1874, in hardback, by the international London-based firm Sampson Low, Marston, Low & Searle. Sampson Low was one of the nineteenth-century’s more prolific publishers of popular fiction that contributed significantly to the transnational world of Empire readership to which Evans belonged. Other writers published by Sampson Low included her contemporaries the American popular authors Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott and the well-known British sensation writer Wilkie Collins. As versions of sensation narrative Evans’ novels are recognised in The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature as being ‘tightly plotted’, incorporating recognisable ‘sensation’ features: i.e. ‘crimes and secret past that helped separate hero and heroine’ involving ‘violations of Victorian sexual mores’ (adultery bigamy, and illegitimacy) (Jones 125)). The elements recognised in sensation writing also featured an ‘emphasis on the unravelling of a mystery that often turned on ‘substitution and false identity)’ (125). This also involved detective work and a ‘documentary’ method of telling the story’, including ‘partial perspectives of letters’ (125). Prior to the full denouement of