Essie Summers was a New Zealand author whose romance novels sold more than 19 million copies in 105 countries. She was known as New Zealand's "Queen of Romance."
Writing
Despite the responsibilities of being a minister's wife and the mother of two children, Summers found time to pen short stories, poetry, and newspaper columns before embarking on her first novel, which sold to the publishing firm of Mills & Boon in 1956. Entitled New Zealand Inheritance, it was published in 1957. "All her romances depict strong-charactered heroines who work for a living. Because most of them marry heroes with farms to run, these women continue to work after marriage and children, and there are many positive portraits of other farming women in the novels." This aspect of her writing suited Mills & Boon's general ethos at the time of her writing, when partnerships between husbands and wives was "a constant theme,... often used to circumvent a particular period's ideology that married women should not work after marriage." Although not generally referred to as a feminist, Summers positions all her heroines "as brave, caring, intelligent and loved for uniqueness." None of her heroes are violent. Summers was the first of many exceptionally successful New Zealand women writers of women's romance novels, e.g., Daphne de Jong and Robyn Donald. Her influence as a role model can only be assumed, but Jay Dixon suggests in her history of Mills & Boon that some of her plot devices may have been picked up by later New Zealand authors. For example, she links Summers and Susan Napier in a discussion of the practice of using characters from earlier books "in later books, as onlookers to another couple's love affair," something that Summers did "frequently."
Biography
Summers was born on 24 July 1912 to a newly emigrated couple, Ethel Snelson and Edwin Summers, who lived in Bordesley Street in Christchurch. Summers was always proud of both her British heritage and her New Zealand citizenship. Both her parents were exceptional storytellers, and this, combined with her early introduction to the Anne of Green Gables stories, engendered in her a lifelong fascination with the craft of writing and the colorful legacy of pioneers everywhere. Leaving school at 14 when her father's butcher shop experienced financial difficulties, she worked for a number of years in draper's shops instead of following her dream to be a teacher. Her first work published, at age eighteen, was the poem Gypsy Heart in the Australian Woman’s Mirror, for which she received eight and sixpence; by this stage the young author had been writing poems and short stories for a decade. Continuing to submit poems, articles and short stories to magazines and newspapers, honing her skills, and even becoming a weekly columnist for the Timaru Herald, under the pen-name "Tamsin" for six years, her husband encouraged her to turn her experiences to good use in writing the romantic novels for which she became famous. She met her husband-to-be, William Flett, when she was 13 years old; it took another 13 years before she consented to marry him and become a minister's wife. They had two children, William and Elizabeth. Summers died in Taradale, Hawkes Bay on 27 August 1998. Essie Summers book covers were featured as part of a heritage romance cover display at the Auckland Central Library in 2013. A Ryman Healthcareretirement village in Christchurch was renamed from Beckenham Courts to Essie Summers Retirement Village in honour of her.
