SOURCE: Jones, Joseph, and Johanna Jones. “Expatriates.” In New Zealand Fiction, pp. 22-32. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983.

In the following essay, the Joneses offer an account of expatriate New Zealand writing, focusing on such authors as Katherine Mansfield, Jane Manders, Shirley Maddock, Robin Hyde, and James Courage.

It was not that either Katherine Mansfield or Frances Hodgkins totally lacked leisure, paper, pens and paint in New Zealand; on the contrary, each added to her impediments and poverty by going away. They did lack, however, an environment in which they could hope to work themselves to the full. They were conscious of great talents, and convinced that those talents would be stifled in a country that was still, in their eyes, raw, colonial and antagonistic. Whatever was the objective truth of their assessment of New Zealand society, their subjective accuracy cannot be questioned.

—W. H. Oliver, 1960

It was Jane Mander's...