Biographies planned

Press, 23 September 1989, Page 5

Biographies planned

A New Zealand baby killer and a New Zealand psychologist are the next subjects for a Dunedin biographer, Ms Lynley Hood, who wrote the biography of Sylvia Ashton-Warner. Ms Hood hopes to have a biography of Minnie Dean, the only woman to be hanged in New Zealand, completed by the 100th anniversary of her death in 1995. She is also working on the biography of a New Zealand-born psychologist, John Money, who has been described as the man who has made the greatest contribution to the understanding of human sexuality since Freud. She describes Mr Money, who now lives in Baltimore, in the United States, as “another world-famous Kiwi who Kiwis don’t know about.” Ms Hood was in Christchurch this week to speak at the women’s book festival. She believes women writers get a lot of recognition in New Zealand, and that their work is worth celebrating because it is so good. The majority of book buyers were women, and the festival was a good

occasion to make them aware of the range and variety of books available, she said. Ms Hood spoke at the festival about the process of writing “Sylvia: The Biography of Sylvia Ashton-Warner,” which was released late last year. She said writing the biography was an obsession for four years. “I slept, ate and dreamt it,” she said. She wanted to write the biography because she believed Ashton-Warner was a fascinating women with a fascinating story, and she was puzzled by the gaps in her autobiography. For the book about Minnie Dean, Ms Hood plans to have the biography “embedded” in a novel about a student writing a thesis on Minnie Dean. The book will be set in 1981, when the Azaria Chamberlain affair was in the news in Australia and New Zealand. Ms Hood believes every society has a legend about women who kill children, like the character of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel.” Many more horrific criminals in New Zealand’s past had gone from notoriety to obscurity, but Minnie Dean had “lived on,” she said.