Known by the name Edith Searle Grossmann, Edith came from Australia with her family, the Searles, in 1878 and was educated in Invercargill and at Christchurch Girls’ High School. The principal of Girls’ High was Helen Connon who took an interest in Edith and supported her furthering her education – among all her other works, Edith would go on to write a book about the Life of Helen Macmillan Brown. Edith entered Canterbury College graduating M.A. with first class honours in 1885.
She was a teacher at Wellington Girls’ High School when her first novel was published in 1890. Angela - A Messenger was a tragic melodrama set in the Wairarapa, Wellington and Sydney, but she developed her feminist vision and mode of expression in two further novels. In Revolt (1893), and Hermione, A Knight of the Holy Ghost (1907) dealt with the subjection of women in marriage. Hermione Carlisle, a feminist theorist and activist, is the heroine of the two novels, which warn of the dangers of a reaction against the 'Woman Movement' and thus a 're-subjection' of women. Her final book, The Heart of the Bush (1910) was a more conventional love story set on a South Island high country farm.
For much of her life in Christchurch, Edith Grossmann worked for the cause of women’s suffrage and became a leader of the Canterbury Women’s Institute. When the Institution began in 1892, Edith ran the literary department while Kate Sheppard ran the economic department.
She married a lecturer at Canterbury College, Joseph Penfound Grossmann. They had a son, Arthur Searle, in 1894, and their marriage was reputedly unhappy. Edith spent many years living away from her husband in Wellington, England and Europe, and Joseph was sent to jail in 1898 for defrauding a professor. On her death in Auckland in 1931 one obituary noted the examples she had set of “an intellectual life lived long and consistently and of service to shining ideals”.
Sources
- The Christchurch Writer’s Walkway, E. Beardsley, Canterbury Branch, New Zealand Society of Authors, 1999.
Related Links
- Search our catalogue for items by Edith Grossmann
- Search our catalogue for books about Edith Grossmann
- Edith Grossmann at the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre
- Edith Grossman at the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography
- Obituary of Edith Searle Grossman, The Press, 3 March 1931, p2
- See Edith Searle Grossman’s signature on the Women’s Suffrage petition and read her biography
- Canterbury Women’s Institute from NZHistory