The biggest mystery is who is Me in the title. In spite of my eyesight problems I couldn’t put the book down. The novel is written completely in verse as a tribute to Robin Hyde the poet and the impact is powerful. Iris wrote when she reached the front of the war “ Dead Bodies lay strewn under the tracks, unburied, some chewed by dogs”. The best part of this biography is Iris’s reporting of the Sino Japanese War in the 1930’s which Philippa Werry describes as “ It was brave and adventurous, and slightly mad, but that was Iris”. She was a writer and poet par excellence and made her life as a journalist but it gave her scant reward for her efforts. She had secret lovers, a secret child that no-one important in her life knew about. It is fair to say that had Iris been a man she would have survived, and she knew that. It was tragic that women in NZ at that time received no benefit from the state even though they paid tax just like a man. Iris Wilkinson was a very resilient young woman who died in London just before WW2 while seeking to earn money so she could support her secretly born son who was being fostered in New Zealand.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |