Steel True!
| HOPE the NZBS will record more portraits from memory like Woman with a Sword, a very real picture of the late Dr Doris Gordon. This portrait had the same vitality as Cecil WoodhamSmith’s Florence Nightingale to whom, both in personality and method, Dr Doris seemed hauntingly alike. Forthrightly, with implied affection, her husband and colleagues recaptured her dynamic quality, revealing by inference her sense of dedication and the somewhat rueful devotion of her disciples. In
retrospect we felt them flinch a little as they faced those urgent directives from Stratford, the commands leaping from the oddly typewritten pages. A nice revelation of personality by typewriter! Attention flagged a little towards the close. I am seldom happy with our women narrators who, as in this portrait, so often assume too holy a tone, missing the true mood of the person or event described. Sentimentality (sworn foe surely to Dr Doris Gordon’s steel) kept breaking in. No doubt the apposite Bunyan quotation offered a neat finish but a truer climax lay in Dr Bill’s last quiet assertion, Mr Robb’s epitome or, best of all, in the final speaker’s review of what lay ahead. For a mission does not end, its course is merely deflected.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19571115.2.44.4
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 953, 15 November 1957, Page 25
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204Steel True! New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 953, 15 November 1957, Page 25
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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