The Passionate Puritan mary jane mander was born in Ramarama, a small settlement near Auckland, in 1877. The daughter of pioneering parents, she led an itinerant childhood, her father’s kauri-milling business taking the family to various parts of the far north of New Zealand. Although much of her adult life was spent in New York and London, the far north was the enduring source of inspiration for her fiction, begin- ning with The Story of a New Zealand River (1920). This first novel examines the life and marriage of an Englishwoman transplanted to a timber-milling settlement on the banks of the Otamatea River. Poorly received in New Zealand at the time, it is now popular and widely recognized as one of the important founding classics of New Zealand literature. The Passionate Puritan (1921), The Strange Attraction (1922) and Allen Adair (1925) quickly followed. This quartet of novels portrays New Zealand pioneer society with an attentive realism and seriousness of purpose that no compatriot before her had sustained at such length. Together they constitute one of our most lively and accessible records of the colonial period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mander’s last two novels, The Besieging City (1926) and Pins and Pinnacles (1928), are set in New York and London respectively. Fluent and professional works, they nevertheless lack the intrinsic interest of Mander’s efforts to capture her own country in prose, and are now generally regarded as a coda to her writing career. She returned to New Zealand in 1932, but never managed to write another novel. Until her death in 1949 she was a tireless advocate for high standards in New Zealand fiction and a mentor to many of the important writers who emerged in the 1930s. damian love is a writer and editor in Wellington, New Zealand. novels in the new zealand colonial texts series Arthur J. Rees The Merry Marauders edited by Julian Kuzma and Lisa Marr Jean Devanny Lenore Divine edited by Kirstine Moffat William Baldwin Tom Hungerford edited by Jim Sullivan The Passionate Puritan Jane Mander edited with an Introduction by Damian Love First published by John Lane 1921 This edition published by the Department of English, University of Otago and Erewhon Press 2014 Department of English University of Otago PO Box 56 Dunedin 9054 Erewhon Press 23/5 Eva Street Wellington 6011 Introduction copyright © Damian Love 2014 The Introduction to this edition is copyright. Apart from fair deal- ing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior permission of the publisher. isbn 978-0-473-26979-1 Contents Introduction · vii Note on the Text · xxx The Passionate Puritan · 1 Bibliography · 191 Introduction What is it that makes a literary tradition? The most obvious answer, and the barest, is an accumulation of works that stand alone and endure on their merits, that have not only historical but also artistic value beyond the immediate scene of their making—books, in short, that need no special pleading to make posterity read them. Traditions are not easily born. An extraordinary talent, a Mansfield perhaps, has a fighting chance of winning its way to maturity, even if another hemisphere is needed in the process. But such talents are rare, and in a very small corner of the world they are unlikely to accumulate, except on a millennial timescale. It is when an ordinary talent fulfils itself that we can begin to speak of a New Zealand tradition. Jane Mander’s talent was ordinary, in the sense that she never had it in her to be a writer of world-class stature. Propitious circumstances would not have made her the Faulkner of the South Pacific, or even the Maurice Gee of the 1920s. Circumstances were not propitious— her education was intermittent and hardwon; neither her family nor her country respected her endeavours; philistinism and poverty were constant constraints upon her—all of which drove her abroad and hampered her writing before finally bringing it to a premature end. Yet she had a vocation, plus a fine personality and important things to say, and in two of her six novels, The Story of a New Zealand River and Allen Adair, she fulfilled herself sufficiently to give us our first minor classics. They are books that, whatever their flaws and limitations, need no special pleading to make us read them today. Between those novels, her first and fourth, Mander wrote The Passionate Puritan and The Strange Attraction, also set in New Zealand, neither of which has been reprinted before. These books can round out our appreciation of her major themes—the values of vii viii Introduction pioneering society and the encroachments of a deadening puritan- ism, particulary as worked out in marriage, and the progress of the colonial New Woman—and enlarge our picture of her professional writing career. And The Passionate Puritan remains a modest but engaging book in its own right, serenely written and vivid in its portrayal of the kauri-milling days of the far north. It is not a classic, but the non-specialist may enjoy it, and that is an achievement for any book nearing its centenary. life and times Mary Jane Mander, the eldest of five children, was born in 1877 in Ramarama, a small settlement near Auckland. Her father Francis Mander was born in New Zealand to immigrant parents, and her mother Janet (neé Kerr) arrived in the country at the age of two. The Kerrs were a farming family, not very prosperous, but with a tenacious Scottish grasp upon literacy and self-improvement, as evident in Jane’s uncle Walter, who by dint of night study made his way to Auckland University College and thence, via Cambridge, to a career as a New Zealand schoolteacher. The Mander grand father, John, was a Fencible, a member of the corps of British soldiers re- ceiving discharge and an acre of land each in New Zealand in 1847 in return for some continued military obligations, the presence of settler-soldiers being intended to shore up the colony’s defences against Maori action. Like many of his fellows he did not flourish, bringing neither capital nor youth to the challenges of pioneer life. His son Francis was to succeed rather better. Frank Mander, indeed, proved to be an exceptional pioneer. Rest- less and indefatigable, by the age of twenty-eight he had accumulated a hundred acres of land in South Auckland, an asset he sold in order to launch a vigorous assault upon the kauri forests of the north. In 1881 he bought a sawmill and bush section at Awhitu, near Manukau Harbour, but soon moved on to Wellsford, then Pukekaroro and, over Introduction ix the course of two decades, to anywhere kauri was still to be found. It was an industry of diminishing returns, pursued with what now seems a crass and deeply tragic disregard for sustainability, and one that required ever greater ingenuity to extract the remaining pockets of timber from inaccessible land. Frank Mander never became enor- m­­ously wealthy, and for many years his daring business ventures meant a hand-to-mouth existence for his family, but he did in the end achieve magnate status, winning the Marsden electorate in 1902 and going on to serve twenty years in Parliament for Massey’s Reform party. He was widely respected in Northland and a stout advocate for its interests. The character of Tom Roland, the milling pioneer in The Story of a New Zealand River, is very loosely based upon him. Life in bush camps was basic, even for the boss’s family, and no- madic in the extreme, as Jane Mander later recalled: ‘We moved as many as twenty-nine times in a few years. Often as many as three times a year.’1 She knew well the spartan conditions she wrote of in The River: The house stood well off the ground on wooden blocks through which the wind could blow what tune it pleased. There was no question of painting it or finishing it in any way. Of course the boss had visions of something more later on. But this would have to do, perhaps for years. It was to be a makeshift, something in the nature of a picnic. Tom Roland, who had lived most of his life in the open air, had acquired the picnic spirit. It had never occurred to him that it had to be acquired. He expected his wife to produce it immediately.2 Such an unsettled childhood had its compensations: her love of the northern landscape and its people, the bush and the gum fields, the Kaipara and its rivers, underpins all four of her New Zealand novels, rising at its best to a solid realism. Education, however, was not among the blessings. Mander’s primary schooling was much interrupted, and in the absence of a secondary school she worked 1 Freda Sternberg, ‘Jane Mander’, The Bookman, March 1924, p. 296 (clipping in acl: nzms 535). 2 Jane Mander, The Story of a New Zealand River (London: Robert Hale; Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1960), p. 15. x Introduction as pupil-teacher at Port Albert and a succession of other primaries, matriculating with the aid of night study in 1897. She stopped teaching in 1900, and when her father bought the Whangarei newspaper The Northern Advocate in 1902, she served as subeditor and reporter: ‘At times I ran the department singlehanded from leaders to proofs, and the proudest boast of my life is that I once brought out the paper four days running without a mistake and caught the four o’clock train.’3 Character-building as it may have been, such drudgery offered little stimulus to the writing career she imagined for herself.