Robin Hyde
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Robin Hyde is one of New Zealand's major poets. Robin Hyde was born Iris Wilkinson in Cape Town, South Africa in 1906. She was brought to Wellington, New Zealand as a baby. She had her secondary education at Wellington Girls' College where she wrote poetry and short stories for the school magazine. After school she briefly attended Victoria University of Wellington. When she was 18, Hyde suffered a knee injury which required a hospital operation. Lameness and pain haunted her for the rest of her life. In 1925 she became a journalist for Wellington's Dominion newspaper, mostly writing for the 'woman's pages'.
While working at the Dominion, she had a brief love affair with Harry Sweetman, during which she fell pregnant. Sweetman left her to travel to England, dying soon after his arrival. Hyde resigned from the Dominion in April 1926 and moved to Sydney, Australia. It was here that she lost her unborn son, Robin, whose name she took as her pseudonym. The trauma of losing both her lover and her child led to Hyde being hospitalised at Queen Mary Hospital in Hamner Springs, back in New Zealand. After a period of recovery, she began to write again, publishing poetry in several New Zealand newspapers in 1927. She was also engaged to write columns for the Christchurch Sun, and the Mirror. However, she became frustated at the lack of creative imput, as the papers merely wanted a social column. Social columns or women's pages were the main outlet available to women journalists during the period.
In 1929 Hyde published her first book of poetry, The Desolate Star. Between 1935 and 1938 she published five novels: Passport to Hell (1936), Check To Your King (1936), Wednesday's Children (1937), Nor the Years Condemn (1938), and The Godwits Fly (1938).
Robin Hyde died by her own hand in England in 1939. She is survived by a son, Derek Challis.
References
[link]Robin Hyde, New Zealand Book Council
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