Louisa Alice Baker

Abstract

Louisa Alice Baker was the first professional New Zealand woman novelist, publishing seventeen books between 1894 and 1913. Most of her fiction was set in the New Zealand she lived in from the ages of 7 to 38, but all of her novels were published in Britain and America where there was an appetite for colonial settings and where her preoccupation with marriage drew comparisons with Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand. Her choice of the pseudonym “Alien” speaks of her sense of dislocation from her New Zealand home and points to a moral feminist message that challenged patriarchal hierarchies.