'Strangled by a Bad Tradition'? the Work of Eve Langley (A GATHERING ON IMMIGRANT AND EMIGRANT Writers) (Critical Essay‪)‬

IN OCTOBER 1940, Eve Langley of Auckland, New Zealand, emerged as one of the winners in a prestigous literary competition in the popular Sydney magazine The Bulletin. (1) This was an amazing victory for a young struggling Australian-born woman writer in Auckland, and her future career looked promising. Langley's prize-winning novel, The Pea-Pickers, was published two years later in Sydney to wide acclaim. Langley came to New Zealand as a young woman and stayed for twenty-eight years (1932- 1960). During that time she published many poems and another novel, White Topee (1954), but she never fulfilled her early literary promise. Although there has been renewed interest in Langley in Australia, her name has disappeared almost completely from view in recent accounts of New Zealand literature. (2) The following is an attempt to understand what happened to Eve Langley and to argue for a re-evaluation of Langley in the context of New Zealand literature and for an acceptance of her as a New Zealand as well as Australian writer. Personal problems played a vital role in her disappearance from view, but her eclipse from the New Zealand literary scene must also be seen as a function of her contemporary society's prejudiced and narrow views of women, her Australian national identity and the perceived (male) role of the writer. Factors such as gender, nationality, timing and changing literary traditions must, once again, be brought in to explain the demise of a woman writer.