Review: Groundwork, by Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson

Here's a declaration to tempt all the Fates. Anything by Michele Leggott is going to be good. Make that good-double-plus. This quite splendid biography / critique / social history of  a 19th century artist and poet certainly is. Written with significant assistance from young academic Catherine Field-Dodgson, it's engaging, lucid, scrupulously researched. 

So, in this centenary year of her death, who was Emily Cumming Harris?

She was above all a talented, industrious, 'thorough and pertinacious' botanical painter. Her watercolours and oils of NZ flora were admired and exhibited internationally. There are 200 of them in this alluring Te Papa publication, and the authors hope more will come to light. Born in England in 1837, she emigrated with her family to the raw settlement of New Plymouth. Her mother Sarah gave birth in mid-ocean, with distressing results. The infant was dropt into the sea this morning at six, sewn up in a piece of canvas.' 

Emily grew to womanhood in Taranaki, living and working on the Frankley Road farm at the semi-rural edge of New Plymouth, accompanying a climbing group part-way up Taranaki Maunga (her fascination with native plants may have started here.) Her brother Corbyn was killed in an ambush during the Land Wars of the 1860s. She began to paint and write. More about those, later.

The Harrises moved to less strife-ridden Nelson, while Emily made a remarkable four-year detour to Tasmania, with the family of Charles Champagne Des Voeux, a name you had to hear. She worked in their Hobart home, studied drawing, returned to NZ via Fiordland and merry japes on the beach.

At 34 Nile Street, near Nelson's Cathedral Square, she became the unmarried daughter of the household, growing middle-aged and then old. Sepia studio photographs show a steady gaze, firm features, large calm eyes. Her later years were spent 'in most necessitous circumstances', according to a visitor from the Turnbull Library. She died in Nelson Hospital, August 1925 from what was bleakly described as 'senility and heart failure'.

So there's a skeletal summary. The book does it far more fully and absorbingly. Oh, and she worked. My goodness, how she worked.

She wrote poetry. Verse, you might call it, but quality and skill glint through the conventional rhymes and archaisms. The authors and the rest of  'Team Emily' (more of that later, also) have found only ten, but more are undoubtedly out there. There's an affecting last glance at a familiar setting. There's a strikingly acerbic comment on colonial entitlement: 'And we may to our homes return / And empty pas for pastime burn'.

But the 'ferociously talented' botanical paintings are the heart and lungs of the book, beating and breathing with Emily's commitment. (Leggott would never use such a clunky metaphor.) 

In bright, full-page reproductions, crimson supplejack berries glow against white convolvulus; kowhai and koromiko are cascades of gold; taupata / coprosma are a blend of ivory, jade and apricot; karaka fruit swells like small sculptures. The renderings are precise, aesthetically pleasing, full of nuances. 

Botanical subjects dominate, but Emily was versatile enough to paint or sketch landscapes and astronomical subjects, too. As a paid-up member of the New Plymouth Astronomical Society (Public Night Tuesday, All Welcome), I can confirm that her comets, stars and eclipses are authentic as well as attractive.

Leggott and Field-Dodgson stress that Groundwork is very much a group effort. Archivists, descendants, post-graduate students have all contributed. You see this in the range of illustrations: Emily's father Edwin, a competent-plus painter of architecture and landscape, features, along with her contemporaries. Contemporary photographs – the NZ Court at the 1886 London Exhibition; climbers in knickerbockers or ankle-length dresses; the 'scientific gentlemen' Emily knew, such as spectacularly-bearded astronomer Arthur Atkinson at his telescope – help provide context, and show how grey-and-white can build a dramatic composition.

The writing is attentive and evocative, often quickened by a springy present tense. The book becomes a tribute to, and affirmation of a woman who is still 'an active verb, resourceful and resilient'. 

I met Michele Leggott in New Plymouth's Puke Ariki Research Centre a few years ago, when this book was just starting to glimmer in a corner of her mind. I accosted her with the question-cum-challenge that writers often have to endure: 'You working on anything?' Michele shrugged modestly. 'Oh, a bit of research'.

I hereby nominate that answer as a contender for Understatement of the Decade. This book is a triumph. Put it on your list right now. Reviewed by David Hill