Edith Joan Lyttleton


Edith Joan Lyttleton was an Australasian author, who wrote as G. B. Lancaster. She was born in Tasmania, and brought up on a sheep station in Canterbury, New Zealand. She produced 13 novels, a collection of stories, two serialised novels and over 250 stories.
She was New Zealand's most widely read writer of the first half of the twentieth century. She wrote about the formation of colonial identity and the legacy of imperialism in the lives of settlers and their descendants. Her settings were Australia, Canada and New Zealand. She was influenced by Rudyard Kipling and R. L. Stevenson.
Her first success was with The Law-bringers, which was made into a Hollywood feature film in the 1920s. Pageant topped the American best-seller list for six months. Other successes were Promenade and Grand Parade.
Lyttleton left New Zealand in 1909 for America, before settling in England. She died in a nursing home in London on 10 March 1945.

Awards and recognition

She was awarded the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal for an outstanding literary work in the previous calendar year, for Pageant in 1933.
Lyttleton Crescent, a street in the Canberra suburb of Cook, is named in her honour.

Novels