"Living As I Do in 2 Places at Once": The Inscription of Displacement in the Writing of Mary Taylor (Essay‪)‬

Over the last two decades, there has been an increased scholarly interest in the writing of nineteenth-century British women in the settler colonies, and researchers across a variety of disciplines have turned their attention to women's letters and diaries in particular in an attempt to re-evaluate their place and role in the vicissitudes of Empire. Historians, feminist and postcolonial critics have reassessed the position of Imperial women, be they colonists, adventurers or the colonised indigene) In New Zealand, the study of emigrant women's letters and diaries has yielded key insights into pioneer life. (2) The first women to emigrate to New Zealand in the 1820s were missionaries, and they were followed by assisted emigrants and women accompanying their husbands from the 1840s onwards. Here, I intend to examine the response to New Zealand of one emigrant, Mary Taylor, and to illustrate how her letters home and her one novel, published in 1890, chart the emergence of sensibilities that would be further developed in later writing by Pakeha women authors. Mary Taylor was born in 1817 to a large middle-class Yorkshire family. She was a close friend of Charlotte Bronte and both attended the same school. While the Taylor family was initially relatively prosperous, their fortunes declined following an economic crisis in England in 1825. The Taylors were not ruined, but as Mary grew up as an independent, forthright young woman, she was determined not to become a financial burden on her family. Social conventions of the time left middle-class women with few employment opportunities, and Mary Taylor was conscious of the social snobbery that she would have had to endure had she gone out to work. Living abroad was therefore an attractive option: her difficult financial situation; the death of her father in 1840 and Taylor's fraught relationship with her mother; and a determination to forge an independent identity finally drove Taylor from Yorkshire. She moved around sporadically, living in Brussels and Germany before emigrating to New Zealand, sailing for Wellington in March 1845. She wrote home to her friends describing her life in the colony, and her letters were collected together, in 1972, in an edited and annotated edition by Joan Stevens entitled Mary Taylor, Friend of Charlotte Bronte: Letters from New Zealand and Elsewhere. (3) All biographical details about Mary Taylor's life discussed in this essay have been drawn from this text and from A. James Hammerton's 1979 study Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration 1830-1914. (4)