Having completed the final version of The Godwits Fly and sent it away to be published, Iris Wilkinson (Robin Hyde)[i] wrote to John A. Lee that she had finished “the camouflaged autobiographical novel and posted it—It will have to go as fiction and it’s only twenty-one years of a life […] But I’ve got a good deal into it that I really wanted to.”[ii]The Godwits Fly had its origins in the therapeutic autobiographical writing that she was encouraged to undertake at the Auckland Mental Hospital, where she was a voluntary patient from June 1933 until early 1937. She recorded in her journal her decision to write a “faintly autobiographical novel called ‘The Godwits Fly’” on March 2nd, 1935.[iii] Over the two years and several drafts that intercede between this journal entry and her letter to John A. Lee, the novel became rather more than “faintly autobiographical.”[iv]
[i] As much as possible, I have tried to use “Robin Hyde” to refer to Iris Wilkinson in her authorial persona. This distinction is sometimes difficult, and may seem artificial, but is important for a paper where a life that was lived is being compared with its fictionalised equivalent and the process of achieving that end.
[ii] Letter from Iris Wilkinson to John A. Lee, 2 April, 1937, Lee Collection, Auckland Public Library (quoted in Patrick Sandbrook, “Robin Hyde: A Writer at Work,” (Ph.D. thesis, Massey University, 1985), 13).
[iii] Mary Edmond-Paul, Your Unselfish Kindness: Robin Hyde’s Autobiographical Writings (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2011), 217.
[iv] See Sandbrook’s introduction to The Godwits Fly, pp. xvii–xxii, for an account of Hyde’s work on the novel and the conditions under which it was produced
