Writer Archives - Page 139 of 155

Ninon de l’Enclos

Being beautiful, witty and fond of cultivated society, she soon became popular in Paris, where she fixed her residence, her favors being sought by many of the most eminent men of the time.

Louise Labé

French poet. At the siege of Perpignan she is said to have fought on horseback in the ranks of the Dauphin.

Mary Augusta Humphry Ward

Immensely popular English novelist.

Sappho, (flourished about 600 B.C.) a Greek poet, native of Lesbos, where she was head of a great poetic school, for poetry in that age and place was cultivated as assiduously and apparently as successfully by women as by men.

Robin Hyde

The volume, range and originality of Robin Hyde’s writing has only recently been recognised. In 10 years she produced 10 books of poetry and prose as well as countless published and unpublished articles and letters. She offered a piercing personal vision of an inner life, yet also conveyed a strong sense of place and an understanding of the historical forces that shaped her world.

Rehutai Maihi

While she may not always have achieved her aims, through her persistence she not only stood for Parliament but maintained on her own a Māori-language newspaper. Well known and respected among Māori and Pākehā, she was rightly remembered as ‘a busy wheel’.

Charlotte Godley

Her letters to her mother, later published, give an invaluable picture – sensitive, sharp, witty – of the challenges, discomforts and pleasures of life in the very early days of the colonial settlement in New Zealand.

Cherry Raymond

Cherry Raymond was a broadcaster, journalist and opinion-leader, and a household name during the 1960s and 1970s when few women achieved such prominence in the media. Although she particularly campaigned on women’s issues, and often on topics which were controversial or taboo, her interests were broad, and she played an important role in raising the profile of mental illness in New Zealand.

Christine McKelvie Cole Catley

The distinguished writer and journalist Christine Cole Catley was one of New Zealand’s leading independent publishers of the late twentieth century. She was co-founder of the Parents Centre movement in the 1950s, and an influential teacher and shaper of broadcasting policy.

Constance Alice Barnicoat

When she died, the Christchurch Press commented that her ‘grip of facts added to an intimate knowledge of European politics and statesmen…had placed her in the front rank of women journalists’. She also excelled as a woman mountaineer.