AMONG THE BOOKS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2677, 5 July 1905, Page 77

AMONG THE BOOKS.

LIFE OF HELEN MACMILLAN"' ' BROWN. By Edith Searle GrßossaiANN, M.A. Christchurch and Dunedin : Messrs Whit-combe and Tombs. "A Woman's Tribute to a Woman" might well have been the secondary title of the charming little volume in white and old which lies before us. Written by Mrs Grossmann, and published on behalf of the Christchurch Girls' High School Old Girls' Association, the proceeds of this biography of a woman for whom it is claimed that "she did more than any other in New Zealand for the higher education of her sex" will be fittingly devoted to increasing the funds of the Helen Macmillan Brown prize. As the memoir of an intellectual life devoted to high aims, of an unselfish, sincere, and essentially strozig feminine nature, the record is a worthy one, worthily written. As a piece of literature it is necessarily imbued with the cultured charm and refinement of all Mrs Grossmann's work, while in outward appearance and technical excellence the publishers have contributed their part' in a fashion to render even a dull theme superficially attractive. It is scarcely needful to remind New Zealand readers how closely and intimately the name of Mi&s Helen Connor, afterwards Mrs Macmillan Brown, was associated with educational progress from her girlhood to her much-regretted

death, in 1903. As a child she was the pupil of Sir Robert Stout in Dunedin, in 1874. When Canterbury College was organised by Professor Macmillan Brown, the question of admitting women as students had not been formally raised. In quietly enrolling Miss Helen Connor as the first student of Canterbury College Professor Macmillan Brown practically inaugurated the open-door policy of our New Zealand Universities. In 1880 Miss Connor took her B.A. degree, thus becoming the second lady graduate in the British Empire, Miss Kate Edger, of Auckland, having been the first. All this record of intellectual work thus strenuously begun, and earned on with capacity and concentration, which enabled Miss Connor, without curtailing for a moment her teaching work in tke Christchurch Girls' High School, to take her M.A. degree in the following year, isjdone Justice to by Mrs Grossmann, while the later achievements of a brilliantly successful but too brief career, together with the personal and womanly developments ot marriage, travel, family life, and her early death, are treated with a tender and sympathetic grace: Unfortunately, no indication of the price of the dainty little book reaches us.