Mary Jane Mander was a New Zealand novelist, journalist, essayist and critic. Mander is best remembered for her four novels set in New Zealand: The Story of a New Zealand River, The Passionate Puritan, The Strange Attraction and Allen Adair.
Background
Mary Jane Mander was born on April 9, 1877, in Ramarama, Auckland, New Zealand. Mander was the eldest of five children born to Janet and Francis Mander in Auckland. Because of her father’s work as a lumberman, her early years were spent moving frequently between remote outposts and often into the sparsely populated bush country.
Education
As a result of frequent relocations because of her father's work (“as many as twenty-nine in a few years,” Mander told an interviewer), she was only able to attend four or five widely scattered years of school. When Mander was fifteen her family was living in a region of the Kaipara district that had no high school. She began studying privately with the school’s headmaster, completing her high school education within a year. At the age of thirty-five, she moved to New York to study at the Columbia University School of Journalism. Mander excelled in her classes but eventually abandoned her studies at the university in 1914.
Career
Early in her career, Mander taught at primary schools in Port Albert, Devonport, Otahuhu and Newton West, New Zealand, from 1892 to 1900. When Mander’s father Francis was elected to Parliament and bought a newspaper, the Northern Advocate, Jane Mander began to work there as a reporter, from 1902 through 1906.
The family’s comfortable financial situation enabled Mander to travel to Australia in 1907 and 1910; in 1912, at the age of thirty-five, she left New Zealand and moved to New York. After several years there she became involved in the women’s suffrage movement and was soon much in demand as a public speaker representing a country where women had had the vote for more than twenty years. She worked for the Red Cross and the National Guard Relief when the United States entered World War I. Mander then worked at a series of jobs while seeking publication for her first novel, The Story of a New Zealand River. Published in 1920, the book received favorable reviews in the United States and England, and while living in New York Mander wrote and published two more novels with New Zealand settings, The Passionate Puritan and The Strange Attraction.
In 1923 Mander moved to London. During the next ten years, she published three more novels, Allen Adair, The Besieging City, and Pins and Pinnacles, and sent columns on art, literature, and current events to New Zealand periodicals. Mander returned to New Zealand in 1932. During the last seventeen years of her life, she published little outside of local magazines and newspapers; however, she became a source of guidance for young New Zealand writers, whom she supplied with editorial and often material aid.
Concerning her writings, Mander’s works contain attacks on the Puritanism, conformity, and snobbery that Mander portrayed as an ingrained part of nascent New Zealand society. In introducing the customs, occupations, and scenery of her country to a wide readership, Mander played a part in inspiring critical and popular interest in New Zealand literature.
Views
Mander’s interest in women’s employment was central to her own life: she had earned her own living at a time when it was uncommon for New Zealand women to do so, and her independent, self-supporting female protagonists are considered by critics to be partial portraits of Mander herself.