Jessie Mackay, 1864–1938

Abstract

On her arrival in Dunedin Mackay began writing a column for the Otago Witness on a range of subjects: literature, social and political issues, current events, cultural matters. The range of her essays included temperance, suffrage, penal reform, anti-vivisection, and employment reform as well as literary matters. In Christchurch she was made the ‘lady editor’ of the Canterbury Times, was the New Zealand correspondent for the British journal Time and Tide, and contributed to publications Jus Suffragi Common Cause Votes for Woman. Her interest in women’s issues, especially the contemporary cause of women’s suffrage (New Zealand women gained the vote in 1890) was reflected in her membership of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the National Council of Women, and expressed in the pieces she wrote for the journal White Ribbon. Her Celtic background was expressed in her advocacy for Home Rule for both Scotland and Ireland, and she was a leading member of the Society for Self-Determination for Ireland. Much of her poetry was first published in newspapers – the Dunedin Outlook, the Auckland Star, the Lyttleton Times, Christchurch papers the Press, Star and Sun, the Sydney Bulletin and Bookfellow, London journals such as Celtic Monthly, the Lyceum, the Spectator. Her first collection of poems, The Spirit of the Rangatira and other ballads, was published in 1889. In the introduction she wrote what could be seen as a cautious manifesto of settler literature, hoping that ‘at least a few [of her poems] have a flavour of