Title: Introduction [to A Christmas Cake In Four Quarters]

Author: Ashlee Nelson

In: A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters

Publication details: Frederick Warne and Company, 1887, London

Part of: Nineteenth-Century Novels Collection

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As a Writer

In New Zealand Lady Barker is known as a “New Zealand writer” – largely because of her successful book Station Life in New Zealand and its likewise successful sequel Station Amusements in New Zealand.³³ And it is certainly true that Station Life in New Zealand was a large part of the beginning of her success as a writer.³⁴ However she only lived in New Zealand for three years and all of her works about the country were written and published after her return to England.³⁵ Additionally New Zealand was a very young colony during her brief life there. Lady Barker lived and travelled in so many different countries that it is too simplistic to try to ascribe her nationality to any one of her homes in particular. The best option is to consider her an English writer both because that is where she frequently returned in between her global travels, and because England owned a great many of the colonies that she travelled and lived in. Therefore think of her instead as a “colonial” writer or a travel writer and writer of the British Empire as a whole.

Even defining her as a travel writer is problematic however, because Lady Barker’s works do not follow traditional travel writing patterns – she tended to focus on the social life of the settlers and their interpersonal relationships instead of the landscape or the setting of the country she was in.³⁶ A biography of her, The Seven Lives of Lady Barker, notes that she agreed with her sons Jack and George that most travels books which ought “to have been exciting, were, in fact, boring” and that she herself preferred exciting tales.³⁷ Moreover her writing, especially in the case of A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters is not strictly factual, but a version of the truth that she has used fictional devices for dramatic storytelling effect.³⁸ After all, A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters was largely prompted by the desire of her sons Jack and George for stories of her life and adventures, and a child is not going to sit and listen to a dry account of observations of the land.³⁹

Lady Barker’s body of work encompasses a variety of genres and styles, and a large spectrum of more factual works to more fictionalized works, from the strictly factual textbook First Lessons in the Principles of Cooking to the dramatized “travel” writing of Station Life in New Zealand to her books for children including A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters. Her works are as varied as her life and places of residence were.