A prized item in the Little Darwin collection of the unusual is a copy of NEW ZEALAND BEST POEMS ,1938, above, a slim volume which once belonged to Helena Ruth Henderson, a Kiwi poet and novelist , who early in life wanted to be the first woman to journey to the Antarctic. Our copy ,with her handwritten inscription , was purchased during a book buying trip to NZ nearly 30 years ago. It includes two of her poems , one RETURNED SOLDIER tells how a pacifist returns home ,“ back from the gates of hell,” who settles into what seems to be normal civilian life, but for the nightmares in which he remembers the good men with German names he killed .
Educated in Christchurch, Helena , born June 12 ,1913, one of six children in a Catholic family , was named after her mother, a prolific writer. Helena’s father staged a fake suicide the night before she , 21, married a non-Catholic in the Christchurch Registrar’s Office , December 4 ,1934. She and her husband, Arnold France, an engineer’s patternmaker, lived on a yacht he had built for several years.
To overcome male prejudice against female writers , she once wrote under the name of PAUL HENDERSON. So if you come across poems by such a person do not wonder if it could be the current NT Chief Minister -unless he has started working on a variation of the old ditty about the boy standing on the burning deck . A prize winning poem in 1949 was later set to music for choir and orchestra .
Her first novel, The Race, written under her own name, was based on a natural disaster – the wild 1951 Wellington to Lyttelton yacht race -in which her husband competed . Twenty yachts set out on what was part of the Canterbury centennial celebrations (Lyttelton being Christchurch’s port ) and only one finished, several vanished, lives were lost. The novel resulted in her receiving a NZ Literary Fund Award and being described as one of the country’s best novelists. Another novel was based on floods in the Canterbury area .
A writer of many short stories, she contributed articles to the NZ Broacasting Commission’s magazine,The Listener , did broadcasts and gave talks about writing and books. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography states she also composed “ advertising ditties” for her husband’s boat building business . Also known as Ruth France, she became a member of the NZ Women Writers’ Society and died in Christchurch on August 19, 1968.
