Louisa Alice Baker was the first professional New Zealand woman novelist, publishing seventeen books between 1894 and 1913. Most of her fiction was set in the New Zealand she lived in from the ages of 7 to 38, but all of her novels were published in Britain and America where there was an appetite for colonial settings and where her preoccupation with marriage drew comparisons with Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand. Her choice of the pseudonym “Alien” speaks of her sense of dislocation from her New Zealand home and points to a moral feminist message that challenged patriarchal hierarchies.
Born on 13 January 1856 in the Warwickshire town of Aston in England, Louisa was the second of five children born to Elizabeth (née Bratt) and Henry Joseph Dawson. A carpenter by trade, Henry Dawson
3359 words
Citation: Moffat, Kirstine. "Louisa Alice Baker". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 October 2019 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12327, accessed 23 November 2024.]
