Taken From Her Own Family

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 107, 11 July 1941, Page 5

Taken From Her Own Family

S a chronicler of early colonisation in Australia few people have better qualifications than " G. B. Lancaster," whose real name is Edith Lyttleton. She knows her subject from the inside. Her paternal grandfather was one of those soldier-settlers in Tasmania, of the type so well portrayed in Pageantmen of birth and standing, accustomed ‘to authority, who transplanted to the unaccustomed soil of Tasmania all the English habits of life-family prayers, a ceremonial evening meal, careful etiquette on every occasion. So it is from the experiences of her own family that G. B. Lancaster takes much of the material for Pageant. Her own father, the Hon. Westcote McNab Lyttleton, having married into a similar soldier family, came to New Zealand with his wife and young family, and settled on a station called "Rokeby," near Rakaia. There were two daughters and two sons, and the eldest daughter, Edith Joan, is the writer known to us as G. B. Lancaster, The

life of the station and the country round about provided the young writer with her first subjects. They were meaty subjects written for the Otago Daily Times and the Bulletin, and collected under the title of Sons o’ Men. — ("A Few Minutes with Women Novelists: ‘G. B. Lancaster; " by Margaret Johnston, 2YA, June 28.)