Edith Joan Lyttleton

Edith Joan Lyttelton (18 December 1873 – 10 March 1945)^[1][2] was an Australasian author, who wrote as G. B. Lancaster. She was born in Tasmania, and bought up (from 1879) 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.^[1] 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.^[1]

Her first success was with The Law-bringers (1913), which was made into a Hollywood feature film in the 1920s (as was The Altar Stairs). Pageant (1933) topped the American best-seller list for six months. Other successes were Promenade (1938) and Grand Parade (1943). She left New Zealand in 1909 for London, where she died in a nursing home on 10 March 1945.^[2]

Awards

She was awarded the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal for an outstanding literary work in the previous calendar year, for Pageant in 1933.

Novels

• Sons O' Man (1904)
• The Spur to Smite (1905)
• The Tracks We Tread (1907)
• The Altar Stairs (1907)
• Jim of the Ranges (1910)
• The Honorable Peggy (1911)
• The Law-Bringers (1913)
• Food Divine (1917)
• The Savignys (1918)
• Pageant (1933)
• The World is Yours (1933)
• Promenade (1938)
• Grand Parade (1943)

Film Adaptations

• Rider of the Law (1919) - original screenplay with H. Tipton Steck^[3]
• The Altar Stairs (1922) - based on her novel of the same name^[4]
• The Eternal Struggle (1923) - based on her novel The Law-Bringers^[5]
• The Little Irish Girl (1926) - based on her story "The Grifters"^[6]
• Bred in Old Kentucky (1926) - original screenplay with Louis Weadock^[7]

References

• G B Lancaster at the Internet Movie Database
• King, Michael (2003). The Penguin History of New Zealand. p. 321. ISBN 0-14-301867-1.