Novel
The Story of a New Zealand River
Jane Mander · 1920
Synopsis
Alice Roland, a well-bred Englishwoman, travels up a river by boat with her children, her belongings and her piano, to Pukekaroro, a sawmill hamlet lost in the kauri forest of Northland, where her husband awaits her. The reunion is cold. Laced into puritan principles, she must live among the men of the work site, while her daughter Asia grows up with other ideas about women's freedom, of mind as of heart and body.
Context
Begun in Australia and completed at home in 1912, the book was rewritten in the United States in 1915, accepted by John Lane in 1918 and delayed by the war until 1920. It was well received abroad; at home, some readers saw immoral innuendo in it, and the Whangarei library put it on a reserved shelf. It was reissued in 1938, 1961 and 1973 and adapted for radio in 1952. Alistair Fox sees in it an important influence on a Jane Campion film shot in New Zealand in 1993, about a woman and her piano.
Who it is for
Four hundred pages, translated into French in 2002. The language is simple, but one must accept a slow pace and a rather large gallery of minor characters.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as a great novel of the country from the thirties onwards, it ranks among its classics and remains the most widely read of its author's six novels.