Robin Hyde and the Long Shadows in the Ladies' Gallery

Abstract

Robin Hyde reported from the Ladies’ Gallery of the New Zealand Parliament sporadically over seven years. Her reports have been considered in past scholarship but have not been previously located within the tradition of New Zealand women’s gallery journalism. This essay argues that Hyde’s reports demonstrate strong stylistic and journalistic connections to this tradition, and that these connections in turn inform some of the negative responses her work received from the cultural nationalist writers of the 1930s.