Louisa Alice Baker, 1856-1926

Abstract

Louisa Baker was the first New Zealand woman to succeed in making a career out of writing novels, publishing seventeen books between 1894 and 1910. Significantly, this success was only possible when Baker left New Zealand to pursue her literary career in England, a departure that later authors, such as Jane Mander and Katherine Mansfield, were to follow. The contemporary appeal of Baker’s fiction lies in its blend of topical issues with romantic melodrama and exotic New Zealand settings. The novels, at their best, are intellectually challenging. Baker is primarily a theological writer who critiques the retributive austerity of Calvinism and advocates liberation through the transforming power of a Gospel of Love. These ideas underpin Baker’s moral feminism. In her writing, love is the central ingredient to human happiness. Marriages without love are doomed and should end. With love relationships flourish and transgressions arising out of love, even sexual lapses, should be forgiven. This originality of thought is at times matched by stylistic innovations. Baker experiments with multi-perspective narratives, interior monologues and dream sequences and uses music and landscape (particularly bush, mountains and rivers) in a symbolic way. However, her prose can be overtly didactic and her writing relies on sentimental Victorian cliches. Death-bed reunions, discoveries of long-lost heirs, murders, miraculous escapes and revelations of long-hidden secrets abound. Playing to her overseas audience, Baker locates her narrative action in the stark beauty of the South Island mountains and the isolated grandeur of the North Island bush. In her novels New Zealand represents raw emotion, primitive, instinctual artistic talent and freedom from claustrophobic ideologies. However, her middle class, European heroes and heroines frequently depart for the cultural environs of Australia and England or arrive in New Zealand from overseas cities on missions of intellectual liberation. Born on 13 January 1856 in the Warwickshire town of Aston in England, Louisa Alice was the second of five children born to Elizabeth (nee Bratt) and Henry Joseph Dawson. A carpenter by trade, Henry Dawson was also a parttime town missionary and preacher. Hints in Baker’s fiction suggest that this religious background, which shaped her early thinking, was strongly Protestant, probably either Methodist or Brethren in denomination. When Louisa was seven the Dawson family came to New Zealand through the assisted immigration scheme, arriving in Lyttleton on the Lancaster Witch in October 1863. They settled in Christchurch, where Louisa was educated.