The nostalgia for a supposedly splendid and certainly ceremonious England which grew up at the end of the nineteenth century among writers and artists especially found its clearest expression in Jessie Weston's novel Ko Meri (1890): “It is the centre of attraction for the whole of the ever-increasing, ever-extending Anglo-Saxon people, whose thoughts, even at the uttermost ends of the earth, ever gravitate towards the Mecca of the race, London”. This impulse was strong still when Katherine Mansfield 20 years later abandoned New Zealand for Europe. Ironically, long before her death in 1923, she had been overwhelmed by the reverse nostalgia and based her short stories, which acclimatised in English the subtle, elusive, sensitive, “plotless” method of Tchekov, on her memories of her New Zealand childhood. This feeling is reinforced by her careless, brilliant, spontaneous letters, which may in fact be the work for which the future will honour her instead of for her more finely wrought short stories Katherine Mansfield's troubled life is well described in Anthony Alper's biography.

Much of Katherine Mansfield's own rejection of the crudity of bourgeois New Zealand, the money-grubbing practical race which had replaced with its calculations the generous spirit of the pioneers, is to be found in Jane Mander's novel The Story of a New Zealand River (1920), which has overtones from the crusading era, finding women the banner bearers of refinement, men the crude animals robbed of all qualities except strength and, if refined, then weak. But Jane Mander, to whom words were stiff, sustaining stays, was a committed New Zealander, as was Katherine Mansfield herself, in her work if not her life. William Satchell, who shared with Jane Mander an old-fashioned straightforward narrative method and the chiaroscuro of characters more wicked or more virtuous than life, also found his themes in this country, in The Land of the Lost (1902) and The Toll of the Bush (1905) going for his material to the same North Auckland area, a derelict country which history caressed briefly before 1840 and then passed by. His historical novel The Greenstone Door (1914) deals with the events of the Maori Wars and inflates Sir George Grey to heroic proportions.

Our best historical novel is Robin Hyde'sCheck to Your King (1936), for which the Baron de Thierry a muddle-headed adventurer of the early days provided a theme rich in irony. Robin Hyde felt strongly the impulse to leave New Zealand for the wider opportunities of England, making it the subject of her last novel The Godwits Fly (1938). When she herself made the journey it was to end in disaster, but not before it had produced Dragon Rampant (1939), the story of her journey in war-torn China. Robin Hyde's life, dedicated but always attempting a little beyond her capacity, is as tragic in its own way as Katherine Mansfield's.

New Zealanders have always been credited with special competence in the production of books on practical themes. H. Guthrie-Smith'sTutira (1921) was a practical book in a new dimension: it is a study of a sheep station in depth, including everything from ecology to the human beings who find on it their way of life. Guthrie-Smith's bird books and his masterly Sorrows and Joys of a New Zealand Naturalist (1936) show the same love of nature and wry human quality.