The Early Poetry of Elizabeth Riddell (1907-1998)
ka mate ka ora: a new zealand journal of poetry and poetics Issue 12 March 2013 Made in New Zealand: The Early Poetry of Elizabeth Riddell (1907-1998) Marcia Russell Editor’s Note: This essay is taken from Marcia Russell’s Master of Literature thesis (2012) at the University of Auckland. We are very pleased to have Marcia’s permission to publish this work. The whole project was to have been a Doctoral thesis and no one was better placed than Marcia, with her literary and journalistic expertise and understanding, to write about and recover for us the life and work, and especially the New Zealand context and origins, of Elizabeth Riddell, poet and journalist. Sadly Marcia died towards the end of 2012 and was unable to complete her undertaking. We are grateful to Marcia’s supervisors, Dr Jan Cronin and Professor Michele Leggott, for enabling this publication and to Heidi Logan for her copy editing on the text. - Murray Edmond 2 Part One: ‘A writing life but not a literary life’1 Elizabeth Richmond Riddell was born on 21 March 1907 in Napier, the second daughter of Violet Whitbread Riddell (nee Williams) and Richmond John Sydney Riddell. Her father was an accountant and solicitor for a Napier stock and station agency, her mother was the third of five children born to George and Emily Williams, all of Napier. Violet’s three sisters, Rose, Myra and Leslie all lived, like the Riddells, on the hills above Napier; the youngest sibling, Patrick, eventually married and settled in Wellington. Riddell’s paternal grandfather, George Riddell, who was the deputy-registrar in the Napier Lands and Deeds Registry, died unexpectedly while cycling to Western Spit on the Petane Road, the year before Riddell was born.
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