Lady Mary Anne Barker is best known for her first book, Station Life in New Zealand (1870), which is considered the best of the settlers' tales from the years of colonization of the islands and is a classic of early New Zealand literature. During her lifetime Lady Barker was also acclaimed for her children's stories, and she is occasionally classified as a children's, rather than a travel, writer. Many of her children's stories derive from her travel experiences, and those books, even if written ostensibly for children, were aimed also at adult readers in the British leisured classes.

The early and continued popularity of Station Life in New Zealand can be attributed to Barker's observant and lighthearted style, through which she vividly portrays the lives of genteel sheep farmers. While she writes in general about the sheep business (Samuel Butler, in his A First Year in Canterbury Settlement [1863], gives...