Description

This beautifully written story of a radical nun who founded a religious congregation sold thousands of copies when it won the Book of the Year award in the Montana Book Awards in 1997. Unusually, it simultaneously won the E. H. McCormick Award for the best first book of non-fiction. Suzanne Aubert grew up in a French provincial family in the mid-nineteenth century. Lyon’s Catholic missionary spirit brought her to live with Maori girls in war-anxious 1860s Auckland. She nursed Maori and Pakeha in Hawke’s Bay as the settler population swelled in the 1870s. In the 1880s and 1890s, living up the Whanganui River at Jerusalem, she set up New Zealand’s home-grown Catholic congregation, published a significant Maori text, broke in a hill farm, manufactured medicines, and gathered babies and children through the family-fracturing years of economic depression. The turn of the century sent her windswept skirts through the streets of the capital city. There she would be a constant sign of political commitment and caring for people ‘of all creeds and none’ until she died in 1926.