ONE of my absolute favourite writers is Jean Devanny (1894–1962).
Although she only lived here for seven years (and is far better known in Australia), Wellington is where she really got into writing. Sadly, you’d be lucky to find any of her books around nowadays, though the library has a few in the Stack Room if you ask.
Her main strength as a writer was also her main weakness: trying to depict life in New Zealand as she really saw it. She felt Kiwi men treated women like possessions, and, in a metaphoric way, no better than farm animals destined for slaughter.
In 1926, while in Wellington, her first novel The Butcher Shop was published.  Although it sensationally sold 15,000 copies overseas, no one in New Zealand got to read it (for decades) because our government banned it. Our cultural custodians feared that some of her little touches (like farmers castrating lambs with their bare teeth) could scare off decent-minded immigrants. But cheer up, the book was also banned in Australia and Nazi Germany.
Jean was one of 10 kids from a poor coal mining family in Ferntown, near Collingwood. She left school at 13 but learned heaps from reading and trade union study groups.
Married at 17, she later came to Wellington with her husband Hal and three kids when he got a job tunnelling through the Orongorongos (why not). They had a house in Garrett St, just off Cuba St.
She enjoyed walking in Thorndon, the early stamping ground of the famous Katherine Mansfield. These two writers had nothing in common in terms of their backgrounds and styles, but both tried to open our minds to a broader society.
Mansfield (in the eyes of her mother who cut her out of her Will) was a twisted little rich-girl who went bad, a whorish slapper, lesbian, gypsy and Maori-sympathiser. Her stories are too mousey to be called progressive, but some of them, like The Daughters of the Late Colonel (where she mocks women who can’t cope without a bully male) and The Garden Party (where a wealthy brat encounters the “alien” poor of Tinakori Rd) at least make a gentle attempt at opening the closet on class and gender issues.
In total contrast, Jean Devanny rips that same closet open and aggressively and clearly describes real living conditions, plus the desperate need for the economic independence of women, and safe, sexual liberation.
Though she flogs these themes to death, she at least focuses on the social reality of the times (and places) she lived in and makes it clear what she thinks.
A passionate, physically tough extrovert, Devanny was never going to go quietly.  She squeezed a lot into her life: 15 books, political activism, the tragic deaths of two children and testing relationships before, thankfully, a Karen Blixen-style final decade celebrating the luxuriant plants and animals of North Queensland.
The day someone makes a movie about Jean Devanny, start engraving the Oscars.