Robin Hyde

This chapter explores the novels of Iris Guiver Wilkinson, who wrote as Robin Hyde. Three of her novels— Check to Your King (1936), Passport to Hell (1936), and Nor the Years Condemn (1938)—counter claims of historical absence or irrelevance by fictionalizing historical people involved in key moments in New Zealand's history, specifically the mid-nineteenth century efforts to establish New Zealand as a colony, the First World War, and the Great Depression. Meanwhile, with Wednesday's Children (1937), Hyde turns to history's antithesis, fantasy, as an alternative route to investigating New Zealand's settler culture. Hyde's five novels exhibit a recurring set of concerns: the articulation of New Zealand as a settler nation and its relationship to the international; the lives of those marginalized by respectable middle-class society; the role of social institutions in the maintenance of middle-class hegemony; and the asymmetry of opportunity, mobility, and sexual freedom for women.