BOOKS * BOOKS * BOOKS * BOOKS * BOOKS * BOOKS * BOOKS * BOOKS *BOOKS

The Search for Anne Perry
(Hardcover Canada)

Joanne Drayton, Anne Perry, HarperCollins, Canada

The Search for Anne Perry
(Softcover, Australasia)

Joanne Drayton, Anne Perry, HarperCollins, NZ

The Search for Anne Perry

Harper-Collins, 3 August, 2012 - 352 pages
In 1994, director Peter Jackson released the film HEAVENLY CREATURES, based on a famous 1950s matricide committed in New Zealand by two teenage girls embroiled in an obsessive relationship. This film launched Jackson′s international career. It also forever changed the life of Anne Perry, an award-winning, bestselling crime writer, who at the time of the film′s release was publicly outed as Juliet Hulme, one of the murderers. A new light was now cast, not only on Anne′s life, but also her novels, which feature gruesome and violent deaths, and confronting, dark issues including infanticide and incest. 
Acclaimed literary biographer Joanne Drayton intersperses the story of Anne′s life with an examination of her writing, drawing parallels between Anne′s own experiences and her characters and storylines. Anne′s books deal with miscarriages of justice, family secrets exposed, punishment, redemption and forgiveness, themes made all the more poignant in light of her past. Anne has sold 25 million books worldwide and published in 15 different languages, yet she will now forever be known as a murderer who became a writer of murder stories.
Drayton was been given unparalleled access to Anne, her friends, relatives, colleagues and archives to complete the book. The result is a compelling read which provides an understanding of the girl Anne was, the adult she became, her compulsion to write and her view of the world.

Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime
(Hardcover, Australasia)

Joanne Drayton, Ngaio Marsh, HarperCollins, NZ

Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime
(Softcover, United Kingdom)

Joanne Drayton, Ngaio Marsh, Harper, UK

Frances Hodgkins: A Private Viewing
(Softcover, New Zealand/United Kingdom)

Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime

HarperCollins, 1 Oct , 2008 - 320 pages
One of the celebrated 1930s and 40s "Queens of Crime' Ngaio Marsh was probably our first million copy author. Her tightly written, stylish whodunits were perennial favorites, rating alongside Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers. She was also seriously in love with the theatre, and her triumphant return to New Zealand to establish the Court Theatre in Christchurch saw her feted and honored with the title dame of the British Empire. With her coterie of 'luvvies' the handsome gay boys who were a part of her entourage and her protégés in many fields of the arts, and her impeccable landed gentry upbringing, Dame Ngaio dominated the New Zealand performing arts scene for many years before her death. A biography was produced to no great acclaim, and it was a tedious hagiography of Dame Ngaio the woman of stature. Dr Jo Drayton, award winning art historian and writer was awarded the Alexander Turnbull fellowship for 2007 and has used the time to complete the research and writing of this her most exciting book to date. There was another story to be told, a much more textured, rich and fascinating story, of a young woman of ambiguous sexuality who reveled in the abandon of the Bohemian Riviera, whose spurned suitor committed suicide and whose scintillating murder mysteries all took their inspiration, setting or characters from the heady life she enjoyed as a member of the in set in England, where one moved between town house and country estate. In what will be one of the most read and most significant biographies of 2008, Ngaio Marsh comes to life and finally steps out from behind the cardboard cutout of respectability and decorum.

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Joanne Drayton, Frances Hodgkins, Random House, NZ

Frances Hodgkins: A Private Viewing
Random House, August 2005 - 304 pages

The life of Frances Hodgkins was full of adventure, involving both physical and artistic journeys in which she crosses hemispheres, cultures, epochs and styles. She took huge risks, had intense focus and exhibited enormous vitality. An ecourager of young artists, she attracted ardent, unstinting support herself, yet she also suffered hurtful dismissals.

Hodgkins worked with and was highly regarded by such well-known artists as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben and Winifred Nicholson – and she became a leading figure of twentieth century British modernism. She is one of the most internationally significant New Zealand-born artists to date.

In Frances Hodgkins: A Private Viewing, art historian Dr Joanne Drayton captures Hodgkins’s life vividly, drawing on the artist’s extensive correspondence with close friends and family on the other side of the world. She critiques individual works (many shown here in full colour) and surveys Hodgkins’s entire career, displaying her unique achievements in their proper international context. The result is a beautiful, compelling and highly readable book that is indeed a private viewing: it offers a sense of immediacy and intimacy and yet also the first comprehensive exploration of Frances Hodgkins.

Rhone Haszard: An Experimental Expatriate New Zealand Artist (Softcover NZ)

Joanne Drayton, Rhona Haszard, CUP

Rhona Haszard: An Experimental Expatriate NZ Artist
Canterbury University Press, 2002 - 125 pages

During Rhona Haszard’s short life she distinguished herself as a ‘New Woman’ whose social and sexual behaviour was highly controversial. She worked as an artist on the Channel Island of Sark, in France, Alexandria and London. She dressed eccentrically, recommended Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, spoke positively of de facto relationships and advocated vegetarianism and unprocessed foods. Most significantly, she wanted to paint innovatively and professionally.

Rhona was born in Thames in 1901, and her family lived in Auckland, Christchurch, Hokitika and Invercargill before, at age eighteen, she enrolled at Canterbury College School of Art, to work with fellow students Ngaio Marsh, Evelyn Page, Rata Lovell-Smith and Olivia Spencer Bower. Even in this talented company Rhona established a promising reputation. A successful future seemed assured by her marriage in 1922 to Ronald McKenzie, but her traumatic elopement with Englishman Leslie Greener seemed to threaten all.

In 1926 the couple escaped to France, where her manner of painting changed. A brighter, Post-Impressionist style rapidly brought international recognition. Her work was hung in the Paris Salon of 1927, and in London she participated in a number of significant exhibitions. In Cairo she was shown at the Galerie Paul, and in Alexandria she had a survey exhibition, and a final show that opened the night before her shocking death at the age of thirty.

Joanne Drayton’s book examines the life and work of Rhona Haszard with great sensitivity, placing her in a fascinating and cosmopolitan social milieu and celebrating her vivid and compelling art.

Edith Collier: Her Life and Work 1885-1964
(Hardcover and Softcover NZ)

Joanne Drayton, Edith Collier, CUP

Edith Collier: Her Life and Work
Canterbury University Press, 1999 - 128 pages

Edith Collier’s contribution to New Zealand Art as an innovator, modernist and expatriate painter placed her in a most distinguished group, but her achievements have been eclipsed by the very company she kept – such as Frances Hodgkins and Margaret Preston. Joanne Drayton’s book – and the travelling exhibition it accompanies – sets the record straight.

After a thorough but conservative art education at the Technical School in Wanganui, Edith Collier left New Zealand in 1913 for St John’s Wood Art School in London. She was then aged twenty-seven. Rapidly disillusioned, and feeling marginalized as an expatriate woman painter, she became more influenced by other expatriates in London, and was to enjoy greater success through exhibiting with the Society of Women Artists and Women’s International Art Club – venues outside the male-dominated art establishment – and became a significant Modernist painter.

Collier returned to New Zealand in 1922 as an experienced artist with innovative ideas, but as a spinster in provincial Wanganui she received harsh treatment, including what Drayton describes as savage critical assessment and negative responses from her own community. In  a well-known incident (on which Drayton casts a new perspective) her father burned many of her finest paintings. Edith Collier died in 1964.

CHAPTERS *  CHAPTERS * CHAPTERS * CHAPTERS * CHAPTERS * CHAPTERS

APRIL 2014 "'Across the Board' - a project exploring diaspora and migration"
Publication of Joanne Drayton's chapter "'Across the Board' - a project exploring diaspora and migration" in PoCoPages, a peer-reviewed series in the collection "Horizons anglophones" published by the Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée. You can easily find PoCoPages among the collections, with the list of the members of the Advisory Board:

http://www.pulm.fr/index.php/collections/horizons-anglophones/pocopages.html