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Die Fremde.
Paperback
Published January 1, 2004
About the author
Beryl Fletcher
11 booksIt is a truism to say feminist author Beryl Fletcher grew up in a different time.
Beryl was 1940s and 50s no-car Mt Roskill state house, one of a happy family of seven, where her only private space was on her bed. Growing up, hers was a world where men went out to work, and women stayed home to raise a family.
She was a bright student who felt out of place at Auckland Girls Grammar but, in her senior school years, found her niche as a member of the foundation cohort at Mt Roskill Grammar, becoming head girl and dux.
She also learned violin and trained as a coloratura soprano. Her first fulltime job was as a school dental nurse, but she later moved to Wellington and went on to work at the National Film Library.
She married the poet William Leadbeater but the marriage ended quickly. Then, while performing in a variety of secondary roles in the newly founded New Zealand Opera Company, she fell in love with stage manager John Duff.
They moved to Sydney where, for a while, she followed the well-worn path of housewife and mother. That marriage also failed and led to an increasing fascination with feminism, spurred on by texts such as Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch.
Beryl returned to New Zealand in 1972 with her two children, Hamish and Ali. Having worked for a while in child welfare, she enrolled at the University of Waikato, where she completed a master's degree in sociology.
Beryl epitomised, in the words of friend, psychologist Jane Ritchie, the "second-chance woman".
"Beryl's life pattern followed that of many women of her generation, of women who worked, then gave up their jobs when they married, and then returned to study."
Jane got to know Beryl when they were involved with the organisation of the fourth, and last, United Women's Convention, held in Hamilton in 1979.
The convention (the Hamilton event was the last of biannual conferences) was attended by about 2000 women.
"We were fighting for very basic rights," Beryl told Waikato Times journalist Denise Irvine. "We tried for the middle road, for something that represented every woman."
While the political reach of the convention may seem tame by today's standards, in 1979 it was threatening to many. Beryl received hate-fuelled anonymous phone calls in its lead up, and removed her name from the phonebook. She never relisted it.
And she always got hacked off about the accusation that the event was a "middle-class white woman thing".
"Who else had the bloody time and the will to do it?" she asked Denise.
During the year of the convention, held at the university, Beryl quickly became known, said fellow organiser Maggie Swain, as an independent, very feisty woman. "She shone through at the convention. She was quite a powerful figure."
Following her master's degree, Beryl won a prestigious Churchill Fellowship to undertake doctoral studies jointly at Waikato and Sheffield University. However, she abandoned her study in protest at the university's failure to deal with a case of sexual harassment on campus.
She later returned briefly as a contract lecturer and occasionally to teach continuing education writing workshops.
Having published one short story in an Australian anthology in 1964, she decided to become a fiction writer in her late 40s, branching out later into creative non-fiction.
She believed many New Zealand women of her age lived her life and wrote of it in her memoir, The House at Karamu.
With her background, Beryl was very comfortable finding her subjects from the other side of the tracks.
"I feel comfortable writing about people from a working-class background because that is the sort of culture I understand," she told Ugandan-born critic and writer Peter Nazareth in 1994 when she was a visiting author at the University of Iowa's International Writing Programme.
Her memoir – like her novels – is as much about social change, and changing identity, as it is about what happened to her.
Beryl told D
Beryl was 1940s and 50s no-car Mt Roskill state house, one of a happy family of seven, where her only private space was on her bed. Growing up, hers was a world where men went out to work, and women stayed home to raise a family.
She was a bright student who felt out of place at Auckland Girls Grammar but, in her senior school years, found her niche as a member of the foundation cohort at Mt Roskill Grammar, becoming head girl and dux.
She also learned violin and trained as a coloratura soprano. Her first fulltime job was as a school dental nurse, but she later moved to Wellington and went on to work at the National Film Library.
She married the poet William Leadbeater but the marriage ended quickly. Then, while performing in a variety of secondary roles in the newly founded New Zealand Opera Company, she fell in love with stage manager John Duff.
They moved to Sydney where, for a while, she followed the well-worn path of housewife and mother. That marriage also failed and led to an increasing fascination with feminism, spurred on by texts such as Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch.
Beryl returned to New Zealand in 1972 with her two children, Hamish and Ali. Having worked for a while in child welfare, she enrolled at the University of Waikato, where she completed a master's degree in sociology.
Beryl epitomised, in the words of friend, psychologist Jane Ritchie, the "second-chance woman".
"Beryl's life pattern followed that of many women of her generation, of women who worked, then gave up their jobs when they married, and then returned to study."
Jane got to know Beryl when they were involved with the organisation of the fourth, and last, United Women's Convention, held in Hamilton in 1979.
The convention (the Hamilton event was the last of biannual conferences) was attended by about 2000 women.
"We were fighting for very basic rights," Beryl told Waikato Times journalist Denise Irvine. "We tried for the middle road, for something that represented every woman."
While the political reach of the convention may seem tame by today's standards, in 1979 it was threatening to many. Beryl received hate-fuelled anonymous phone calls in its lead up, and removed her name from the phonebook. She never relisted it.
And she always got hacked off about the accusation that the event was a "middle-class white woman thing".
"Who else had the bloody time and the will to do it?" she asked Denise.
During the year of the convention, held at the university, Beryl quickly became known, said fellow organiser Maggie Swain, as an independent, very feisty woman. "She shone through at the convention. She was quite a powerful figure."
Following her master's degree, Beryl won a prestigious Churchill Fellowship to undertake doctoral studies jointly at Waikato and Sheffield University. However, she abandoned her study in protest at the university's failure to deal with a case of sexual harassment on campus.
She later returned briefly as a contract lecturer and occasionally to teach continuing education writing workshops.
Having published one short story in an Australian anthology in 1964, she decided to become a fiction writer in her late 40s, branching out later into creative non-fiction.
She believed many New Zealand women of her age lived her life and wrote of it in her memoir, The House at Karamu.
With her background, Beryl was very comfortable finding her subjects from the other side of the tracks.
"I feel comfortable writing about people from a working-class background because that is the sort of culture I understand," she told Ugandan-born critic and writer Peter Nazareth in 1994 when she was a visiting author at the University of Iowa's International Writing Programme.
Her memoir – like her novels – is as much about social change, and changing identity, as it is about what happened to her.
Beryl told D
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