Woman’s Work in Many Spheres

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 236, 24 December 1927, Page 8

Woman’s Work in Many Spheres

No. 16: Mrs. Mary Boyi

T ONG before they decided to leave the intimate world of London literature and come to live in New Zealand, both Mr. A. S. Boyd and Mrs. Boyd had won the accolade of their arts. Illustrator and writer, they had each climbed their ladders and had collaborated with notable success. Now they, live quietly at Takapuna, where the sea laves their front gate and opens upon a garden of old-fashioned clustering flowers. For gardening is Mrs. Boyd's hobby now. Her role in literature is that of an encouraging critic of New Zealand talent and as president of the League of New Zealand Penwomen she devotes her efforts to fostering the literary consciousness of her adopted country. Fiction and travel, essays, reviews and miscellaneous contributions to a

large number of Scottish and London magazines have made the name of Mrs. Mary Stuart Boyd very widely known and her ripe judgment on our national literature—that it most certainly has a future and is now on the way to its realisation---should be encouraging to those who, in our rather restricted publishing held, have fleshed their pens with disappointing results. “That is their trouble,” said Mrs. Boyd. “It is so difficult to market work. There is any amount of good material produced with the fresh and novel outlook of the country and it would succeed if it were marketed properly. Pay is a pittance here. With almost a sole exception in the case of THE SUN, there is no decent regard for a writer’s self-respect.” For the encouragement and the reward it gave contributors, Mrs. Boyd handed THE SUN a bouquet. It was, she said, the greatest force for the creation of a New Zealand literature. She had been reading with approval the Christmas Number and expressed her pleasure high merit of the prize-winning contributions. “And think of the interest that will have been shown throughout the Dominion in the choice and placing of the prizewinners. It has created a very great interest among those who read as well as those who write. “I remember years ago as a member of the London Lyceum Club assisting in the reading of a pile of New Zealand manuscripts. I thought them good at the time, and all those we selected were printed by a London magazine. I have often wondered where those writers have gone now—one, I know, is dead.” But Mrs. Boyd has quite an inspiring faith in the talent that is showipg itself now. She remarked the fact that no men had come forward to sustain the Dominion’s name and that Katherine Mansfield’s genius dominated the field! But when New Zealand women had surmounted the marketing difficulty and likewise had found some solution to the servant problem and had the leisure to write, then the land would light with an outburst of successful national literature. - " ~ _ HAM.