1. Biography

Edith Searle Grossmann was born Edith Howitt Searle at Beechworth, Victoria, Australia on 8 September 1863, to George Smales Searle, a newspaper editor, and his wife Mary Ann Beeby. The family moved to New Zealand in 1878, where Grossmann attended Invercargill Grammar School. In 1879, she was sent to Christchurch Girls’ High School. Some biographies suggest that she was head girl¹, but it more likely that she was Dux in both 1880 and 1881. The principal, Helen Connon (later Macmillan Brown) acted as a mentor to her, encouraging her to apply for university entry. Grossmann was one of four women in her year and was awarded a Junior Scholarship to Canterbury College in 1880, and a Senior Scholarship in 1882, graduating BA in 1884. In 1885 she received her MA with first-class honours in Latin and English, and third-class honours in political science. The influence of Connon on Grossmann, and the esteem that Grossmann held her in is reflected in Grossmann’s 1905 Life of Helen Macmillan Brown.

There is much evidence that Grossmann was a motivated and excellent student. She won prizes for her work, including a commendation for the Bowen Prize in 1882, coming second to a Joseph Penfound Grossmann, and winning the prize in 1883 ² and she was involved in the debating society, arguing for the higher education of women, and the importance of the Married Women’s Property Act.³ In his 1931 obituary, John Macmillan Brown described her as one of his most talented students, and her success at university is undoubted. The efforts of biographers to “discover” Grossmann’s motivation to be educated will most likely be to no avail, but it is hard to resist reading between the lines of Rebecca Burns’ research of papers that belonged to Phoebe Churchill Meikle. Burns suggests that Grossmann might have been motivated by her mother, who was determined to teach her daughter a lesson by sending her into domestic service for an English clergyman. Apparently the episode was such that Edith became determined not to enter such domestic service again.⁴ Whatever the motivation was that drove Grossmann to excellence, her commitment and passion for a full education echoes through her novel The Heart of the Bush.

After graduation in 1885, Grossmann moved to Wellington where she taught at Wellington Girls’ High School until her marriage to Joseph Grossmann, her competitor for the Bowen Prize and a fellow former-student of Canterbury College, on 23 December 1890. In the same year, she published her first novel Angela: A Messenger under her maiden name, Edith Howitt Searle. According to Kirstine Moffat, Angela: A Messenger is ‘a moral tale, more tract than fiction’⁵ where the unhappy heroine is ostracised for alleged adultery, converts to the Salvation Army at a Feilding rally, moves to Sydney for her faith and is murdered on the beach by a drunk. Critics have called it ‘a narrow crusading affair’⁶ and though the feminist ethos is evident, the novel is limited in its expression of the possibilities for a woman ‘as upholders of morality’⁷ in the world.

Grossmann continued to work after her marriage and the couple returned to Christchurch. There she and her husband were founding members of the Canterbury Womens’ Institute (CWI) in September 1892, which was involved in campaigning for women’s suffrage, alongside Kate Sheppard, among others,⁸ where Grossmann worked as the convenor of the literary section. In her biography of Helen Connon, Margaret Lovell-Smith wrote that Grossmann was ‘one of the most vocal and persistent advocate of women’s rights in Connon’s circle, and noted that Grossmann had written articles clearly linking the desire for the franchise with the higher education of women.⁹ The CWI worked alongside the Womens’ Temperance Union collecting signatures from women over the age of twenty-one, and in 1893 were finally successful in petitioning for the franchise, collecting for the third petition collecting 23,991 signatures.¹⁰ As well as her work for the CWI, Grossmann published her second novel In Revolt in 1893, which introduced the character Hermione Howard. In this novel Grossmann explores the education of women, their position within marriage as ‘possession’ of the husband, and the effects of alcohol and drunkenness, offering my favourite line of Grossmann’s: ‘He kept on drinking hard, but only seemed to have drunk himself stupid’.¹¹

Grossmann gave birth to her only child Arthur Searle Grossmann on 5 December 1894, and there were indications that he was handicapped in some way, though his actual disability has not been discovered. In her research, Rebecca Burns suggests that there might be further details that might complete a more accurate picture of the situation Grossmann found herself in. Arthur ‘initially appeared to be a normal, healthy child’ but by 1903 she had taken him to London to seek some sort of treatment for his disability.¹² In 1897,she had left her husband, moving to Wellington and tutoring at the university, while her husband was convicted of fraud and sent to prison for two years in November 1898.¹³ She later moved to Auckland, working as a free-lance journalist for New Zealand and British newspapers and journals, including the Otago Witness, The Contemporary, and The Nineteenth Century and After. Again, Burns reflects on the subtleties of their marriage suggesting that although the Grossmann’s never lived together after 1903, they had not ‘severed their ties irrevocably’.

In June 1902 Grossmann was sent as a special reporter to Pacific Island coronation ceremonies for King Edward VII, and then moved on to London in 1903 where she based herself with her son for the next nine years. She was a founding member of the Lyceum Club in London, and began a New Zealand circle, writing articles for the Empire Review.¹⁴ Following the death of Helen Macmillan Brown, Grossmann wrote her biography Life of Helen Macmillan Brown in 1905, possibly at the request of Macmillan Brown’s husband, in what Moffat calls ‘a tribute to the transforming power of education in women’s lives in general' and Grossmann’s life in particular. Jane Stafford and Mark Williams comment that Grossmann’s ‘most complete discussion of marriage’¹⁵ is found within this book, ‘informed by the ambivalent feelings about marriage, men and sexuality found in her novels.’¹⁶ The sequel to In Revolt, A Knight of the Holy Ghost was published in 1907¹⁷ to some acclaim, with one reviewer suggesting parallels with the work of George Eliot and Emily Brontë.¹⁸ In the preface of this novel, Grossmann describes the women’s movement as ‘a great struggle which aims at overthrowing the power of a small privileged class over a large dependent class, and the power of one privileged sex over a more dependent sex’.¹⁹ Her heroine, Hermione wants to ‘set women free from all but natural disabilities,’²⁰ but the novel ends on a bleak note with the death of the protagonist.

As a working journalist in Europe, Grossmann travelled across Britain and the continent producing articles that were published in England and back in New Zealand, remaining involved with women’s suffrage movement in Britain, even marching with a demonstration in June 1910.²¹ Grossmann returned to Auckland with her son in November 1912, and he was removed from her care to a Christchurch farm in 1914. Burns concludes that she had some kind of psychological breakdown following her separation from Arthur, ‘from which her mind was never able to fully recover’, and adds that friends noticed her ‘mental instability’ upon her return from Europe. Grossmann died at St Heliers in Auckland on 27 February 1931, and is buried at Hillsborough.

The prospect of education was certainly the door to freedom for Grossmann, and the outlet for a woman who might feel the limitation of her sex. Her family clearly valued education to such an extent that the young scholar was able to take advantage of opportunities not available to many other young students, not least young women. Certainly her position in society made these sorts of possibilities much more attainable and her friendship with Helen MacMillan Brown, which was established through their relationship at Christchurch Girls’ High School, was seminal in her development. Further, her relationship with her husband must have been, in some degree, supportive; he was engaged in the support of the women’s franchise, and alongside his wife was a founding member of the CWI. While her husband was imprisoned, she worked as a teacher and a journalist to support herself and her son, and was deeply indebted to the education that had allowed her to be able to pursue her goals with an amount of freedom she might not otherwise have been permitted.

The Burns research reveals more nuance of their relationship, with details provided from the Meikle papers allowing a fuller and more complicated biography of Edith Searle Grossmann than was previously understood. Burns reflects that while some of the prevailing sentiment of biography suggests that the relationship between husband and wife was fraught, there is also reason to believe that their marriage was probably more complicated than the black and white portrayals of an unhappy union; the Meikle papers reveal, in letters, that Joseph was proud of his wife’s academic achievements, admired her ‘brilliant brain’, and in spite of alleged affairs on his part, continued to ‘adore her’, even as they could no longer live together.²² Her husband had asserted that mental illness on his wife’s part and his child’s handicap were mitigating circumstances surrounding his eventual dismissal as Professor of History and Economics from Auckland University College in 1932.

Grossmann worked as a journalist to support herself and her son, and was deeply indebted to the education that had allowed her to be able to pursue her goals with an amount of freedom she might not otherwise have been permitted. It seems clear that Grossmann’s attitude to her position in the world was, from a very young age, focused on the combined impacts of education and gender. She wrote for the Otago Witness in 1894 that:

“Women especially rarely reach the fulfillment of their intellectual promise; duties and cares divert their powers into other directions; in their youth thoughts and brilliant fancies come, but no time is found to develop or reproduce them, and ultimately – as happens with all unused faculties – all possibility of expression is lost and imagination itself is deadened.”²³

Through her work with the CWI, as a teacher at Wellington Girls’ High School, and in her novels and journalistic writing, Grossmann wanted to explore the possibilities available to women for intellectual and creative expression, through education and marriage, in a new century. By the time The Heart of the Bush was published in 1908, she had formed modern opinions about the types of relationships that might be required to make a twentieth-century marriage work. Grossmann’s Adelaide Borlase was to come into her own as the novelistic fruition of a new type of New Zealander.