New Zealand Women have always written passionately about the issues that most affected their lives: education, domestic violence,sexuality, poverty, the institution of marriage, and creativity itself. A commentator of the 1930s lamented the fact that these women, writing of matters not counted 'significant' in a man's world, were in such 'deadly earnest.'
This collection of short stories and extracts from novels spans the last hundred years and exemplifies those themes.
In Deadly Earnest provides a comprehensive introduction to the wealth of women's writing in New Zealand, and it portrays vividly what it means and has meant to be a woman in New Zealand.
