Your Unselfish Kindness edited by Mary Edmond-Paul review

Edmond-Paul’s magisterial editing and comprehensive introduction make this an essential work for anyone interested in New Zealand literature, says Redmer Yska.

By Redmer Yska In Books

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7th July, 2012

Review

When poet and journalist Iris Wilkinson attempted suicide by jumping into the Waitemata in 1933, she’d already had two children while unmarried (one was stillborn) and had been battling depression and addiction for nine years. She was 27. Rather than be dispatched to the 1930s equivalent of the asylum’s rubber room, Wilkinson agreed to go into a clinic attached to Auckland Mental Hospital. There, she awoke in the hands of humane and prescient clinicians, notably this country’s first qualified psychologist, Dr Gilbert Tothill. The first weeks were rocky. Wilkinson was caught trying to smuggle ...

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