Robin Hyde (Iris Wilkinson), 1906-1939

Abstract

Robin Hyde, poet, novelist, journalist, is now acknowledged as a major figure in New Zealand twentieth-century culture, although the literary nationalist group that became prominent in New Zealand in the late thirties and early forties temporarily eclipsed her reputation. Hyde had an immensely productive short life but the self-doubt and anxiety that had plagued her were exacerbated by the social isolation of London and she committed suicide there at the age of thirty-three. During her lifetime Hyde was well-known as an outspoken journalist and literary commentator as well as poet and novelist; her intelligence as a writer, the stylistic interest and beauty of her work, and her ability to encapsulate and comment on contemporary society have only been fully understood as her novels have been brought back into print, her autobiographical writings discovered, and unpublished papers—including poems, letters and short fiction—further studied in the context of her life. These new discoveries reveal her as a female modernist, even in some respects a New Zealand Frida Kahlo figure, whose physical suffering and experience of gender politics in personal and professional life gave her work a special resonance; and because Hyde’s writing drew so much on her own experience, it is of particular importance to understand her literary and personal history together. Hyde was born Iris Wilkinson in Cape Town on the nineteenth of January 1906. Her family history reveals a complex engagement in imperial projects— war, communications, and colonial administration—that characterised a significant part of the movement of population to New Zealand and other Commonwealth countries at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her father, George Edward was born in Agra, where his father (originally from Yorkshire) had a successful career in the Indian Civil Service. At eighteen years old he joined an Anglo-Indian corps to fight in the Boer War. After the war hospitalised with war wounds, his wife-to-be, a twenty-nine-year-old Australian, working in South Africa en route to England, nursed him. Unsure as to employment, George finally settled with the post and telegraph service and when Adelaide (Nelly) nee Butler fell pregnant they married. Following the birth of their second daughter, Iris, the family sailed for New Zealand, perhaps assuming that country would also need young men with experience in