She was also becoming a doyenne of New Zealand theatre, mounting numerous Shakespeare plays, producing some with the D. Overall, Marsh wrote 32 novels and an autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew. You will notice that Colour Scheme and Died in the Wool were published during war years when Ngaio Marsh did not travel to England and brought her Detective Alleyn to New Zealand for war-related reasons.
Ngaio died at her beloved home in February Marsh mixed in occultism with Shakespearean details — Lord Wutherwood's eye is put out as in King Lear , where Shakespeare had the Duke of Gloucester tortured and blinded on stage. She also worked with the drama department of Canterbury University and settled into a yearly routine that allowed her to spend about nine months writing a book and three months to mount a production of Shakespeare by students.
From to she was producer for D. O'Connor Theatre Management. One of her major directorial assignments include Pirandello's play Six Characters in Search of an Author , which she first saw in at the Westminster Theatre. After the death of his father in , Marsh devoted about nine months of the year to writing and three months to theater.
At Marton Cottage, she had a large personal research library. Marsh liked to study thoroughly the topics with which she dealt. Curiously, she disliked writing, according to her cousin and chief inheritor John Dacres-Manning, but writing also provided her money for the theater work. Her dedication in producing Shakespearean plays was recognized by an award from the Order of the British Empire in , and in she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her services to literature and theater in New Zealand.
Her last full-scale production, Shakespeare's Henry V, was produced in Her autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew , came out in revised in In Marsh wrote her own funeral intructions. Marsh died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Christchurch, N. Her final novel, Light Thickens , which blended theatre and crime, came out posthumously.
Marsh's best-known character is the Shakespeare-quoting Inspector Roderick Alleyn. The name was created as a compliment to her father, who had attended a public school founded by the Elizabethan tragedian Edward Alleyn In the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, Alleyn has an encyclopedic mind. He is assisted by Inspector Fox, who first appears in Enter a Murderer Nigel was eventually dropped from the stories in the s; Fox grows gradually more prominent and takes Nigel's place as a comic character.
Later Alleyn marries Agatha Troy, an absent-minded, thin, shy and funny painter, whose character was not far from Marsh's own in the s. Troy is a sympathetic listener and her sharp eye is a great help to Alleyn. Marsh once revealed that both her agent and publisher were opposed to her introducing Troy to the series. Forster and became intensely involved with local dramatic production.
Marsh enjoyed these years immensely, made new friends and won an impressive clutch of scholarships and prizes in composition, studies from life, and for figure composition. Wilkie this script. Marsh had already become a familiar figure with the genteel Acland family of Mount Peel Station near the Rangitata River after tutoring the son of Sir Hugh Acland in Christchurch and becoming an occasional visitor at Mount Peel from She was buried in their family churchyard at the Church of the Holy Innocents in Marsh continued to paint and exhibit with The Group sporadically into the s, although this waned as regular contractual obligations to produce a book per year kicked in.
Marsh sailed to England in and spent almost five years there with the Rhodes-Plunket families, writing and opening an arts and crafts decorating shop in partnership with the Hon. Sayers novels. Nancy C. Upon her return to New Zealand after this brief sojourn in a Europe teetering towards war, Marsh found her novels being touted as mainstream successes in England, and she continued to look after her elderly widowed father in Cashmere, produced more plays for local repertory societies in New Zealand and sat out the Second World War in real anguish for her friends enduring the privations and turmoil of war in Britain.
In Marsh attended the International Conference on Theatre History in London and in paid her first visit to the Far East and the United States where she was treated to a hail of publicity. In July she produced Twelfth Night to open the Ngaio Marsh Theatre in Christchurch and her final full-scale production was of Henry V at the close of when she was 77 years of age to open the theatre in the new Christchurch Town Hall civic complex.
Life had to be quieter in these autumnal years but Marsh loved to entertain and her home now a house museum remained a lively gathering place for her wide circle of friends. She just managed to complete this text in her new study with its expansive views of both her English-New Zealand country garden and of her beloved Southern Alps mountain range a mere six weeks before her death: a gentle passing in the dignity of her own home occasioned by a speedy cerebral haemorrhage.
A contemporary of Dorothy L. In addition, she continued working as a highly competent visual artist, executing and exhibiting a variety of oil paintings from the s into the s before her dual career as a crime novelist and producer of repertory theatre limited these endeavours to making scenic and costume designs for her long extended season of Shakespearean productions at the University of Canterbury New Zealand from In she received the first Honorary Doctor of Literature degree conferred by her alma mater, the University of Canterbury.
The dilemma of the sensitive New Zealander attracted to metropolitan style but belonging to New Zealand was limned in the figures of Roberta Gray Surfeit of Lampreys , Dikon Bell Colour Scheme and Cliff Johns Died in the Wool —young people caught in the irreconcilable pull between local belonging and Northern Hemisphere sophistication and aesthetic-intellectual variety, and all too aware at the same time that valid national art cannot be force-fed.
However, Marsh had her detractors, notably Edmund Wilson. As such, her corpus usefully fossilizes a long-lost mindset of the obedient colonial who held to an idealized view of England.
It is a commonplace of modern criticism that rhetorical figures in texts may correspond to psychological defence mechanisms in the psyches of authors. This thesis certainly holds a degree of validity in the stylishly evasive detective fictions of Dame Ngaio. I like to think we may be doing something the same. It must have a beginning, a middle and an end. The middle must be an extension and development of the beginning and the end must be implicit in both.
The writing is as good as the author can make it: nervous, taut, balanced and economic. Descriptive passages are vivid and explicit. The author is not self-indulgent. If he commands a good style, there is every reason for maintaining it. In an age of immensely long and undisciplined novels we can do with some shapely ones and in the midst of much pretentious obscurity a touch of lucidity is not unwelcome.
Day Lewis and much later P. It was a stylish swan-song to cap a life of great fulfilment and signal achievement. The New Zealand Literature File. The New Zealand Book Council. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Death at the Bar. Death of Peer. Boston: Little, Brown, ; also published as Surfeit of Lampreys. London: Collins, Death and the Dancing Footman. The name was created as a compliment to her father who had attended a public school founded by the Elizabethan tragedian Edward Alleyn.
Roderick Alleyn is assisted by Inspector Fox who can quote Shakespeare. Later Alleyn marries Agatha Troy, an absent-minded, thin, shy and funny painter, whose character was not far from Marsh's own in the s.
Another figure from the first books is the journalist Nigel Bathgate, whom Alleyn could not tolerate. Marsh later dropped him from the stories. Like Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey, Alleyn has a noble background, but instead of becoming a diplomat he joined the police force after returning from World War I. Giles, where Alleyn returned occasionally in later books.
During World War II Alleyn chased spies, but after the war he continued in the same style as in the s. Typical of Marsh's mysteries is vivid characterization and dialogue. Julian Symons has praised in his book Bloody Murder Marsh's capacity for amused observation of the undercurrents beneath ordinary social intercourse, as in the novel Opening Night.
In a New Zealand television company released adaptations of four of her novels as the "Ngaio Marsh Theatre. Although her novels had English protagonists, relied on British class structure and social environment, she thought of herself as a New Zealander.
0コメント