A WOMAN’S DIARY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 1, 30 June 1939, Page 10

A WOMAN’S DIARY

THE FARMER’S WIFE: A COUNTRY WOMAN’S CALENDAR. By Anne Earncliff Brown. Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd. 7/6. If this book does not run speedily into a second edition the women of New Zealand are not what they used to be. It is both witty and sentimental, a slice of life and yet a thoroughly good piece of writing. It is even a recommendation that it is no longer true as it stands. It was true when it was written five or six years ago, and Mrs. Brown is far too wise now to attempt to change it. She knows that a story can’t be reconstructed any more than a life can be relived. Much has happened to her and to us all since the great

depression. We are no longer what we were politically, socially, or economically. Above all, we are different internationally. But in 1932 these were her experiences and her thoughts-the things she did, the books she read, the troubles she encountered, the jokes that neither poverty nor sickness could quite smother. It is not so much a brave book as the book of an articulate woman whose pen could not help recording things as they happened, so that it is neither tragedy nor comedy nor "cracking hearty" nor highfaluting. It is certainly sentimental, as we said to begin with. So are we all secretly. But Mrs. Brown was neither able nor anxious, when she wrote her diary, to rise superior to these ordinary human feelings. She has her kitchen moods quite as often as her romantic moments, and expresses one as frankly as the other. The illustrations are clearly an afterthought, but they are such a bright afterthought, and have been so well printed, ‘fhat no reader will feel them to be an intrusion. It is pleasant to see a New Zealand book so well bound, provided with such an attractive dust cover, and printed on such good paper. When the second edition appears the recipes and other quoted matter could perhaps be printed in a smaller face. A talk on this book was given recently from 2YA, Wellington.