Robin Hyde

Iris Guiver Wilkinson, better known as Robin Hyde, her chosen name as poet and writer, was born on 19 January 1906 in Cape Town, South Africa. She was the second daughter of Edith Ellinor (Nelly) Butler, an Australian nurse who on her way ‘Home’ had met and married George Edward Wilkinson, an Englishman working on the installation of a post and telegraph system in South Africa. When Iris was a month old the family sailed third-class in the Ruapehu for New Zealand.

Settling in Wellington, the Wilkinsons rented a series of dingy houses in Newtown, Melrose and Berhampore where two more daughters were born. The household was violently divided in its opinions, Iris’s mother enthusiastic for God and empire, bluebells and manners, her father immersed in books denouncing capitalism, imperialism and religion. The story of her early life is told in her autobiographical novel The godwits fly, and in a haunting sequence of poems in Houses by the sea, published after her death. She was a pupil at South Wellington School and Berhampore School, where she was dux in 1918. After her family’s move to the suburb of Northland she attended Wellington Girls’ College, where she made a lifelong friend, Gwen Hawthorn (later Mitcalfe). Although Iris wrote dismissively of her education there as stodgy and cold, she received encouragement for her writing. Many of her poems and stories appeared in the school magazine between 1919 and 1922.

At 17 the ‘Schoolgirl Poetess’ joined the staff of the Dominion, also working on the children’s page of the New Zealand Farmers’ Advocate. She had a love affair with one of her father’s protégés, Harry Sweetman, which was fictionalised in The godwits fly. They planned to go to Europe together, but at 18 she spent some months in hospital after a knee operation. She came out on crutches, lame for life, dependent on opiates for pain relief, to find that Harry had gone without her. She learned much later of his death shortly after his arrival in England.

Returning to work at the Dominion she wrote ‘Peeps at Parliament’ under the pen-name ‘Novitia’ during the election year of 1925. Although flippant (as at that time her age, sex and the editor dictated), the column touched on some serious social concerns. She met politicians William Downie Stewart, Daniel Sullivan and John A. Lee, who became lasting friends. A brief love affair while she was receiving treatment for her knee in Rotorua left her pregnant. In April 1926 she resigned from the Dominion and sailed for Sydney. Five bleak months there ended with the birth and death of a son. She gave him the name Robin Hyde, then borrowed it back from him, to use for her serious writing. On her return to New Zealand she had a nervous breakdown, and in 1927 spent some months in Queen Mary Hospital at Hanmer Springs.

Writing again, she had some poems published in newspapers. John Schroder, from the Christchurch Sun ’s literary pages, began a correspondence with her that lasted till her death. He became her literary adviser and friend. Back in Wellington she found only occasional work as a jobbing journalist. She joined New Zealand Truth in September 1928, then, after being sacked, with Schroder’s help she was appointed to assist Esther Glen with the women’s page of the Christchurch Sun. She was employed by the Wanganui Chronicle by March 1929. At each post she inserted controversial interviews or subversive comment into the society or shopping columns.

Her first collection of poetry, The desolate star, was published in 1929. Few copies sold. In Wanganui she became pregnant after a brief fling with a married journalist who suggested she pay half the cost of an abortion. ‘Well, I thought, you can’t say we haven’t got sex equality all right’. Hyde refused the abortion and took six months’ sick leave claiming ‘a dicky heart’. She lived near French Pass and later at Picton under an assumed name; her son, Derek Challis, was born in Octo