Lily Woodhouse unmasked
When read an Auckland-set bodice-ripper penned under a pseudonym, he began to investigate – and found a well-known author behind the pen name.
‘‘IDavid Herkt
am Lily Woodhouse,’’ concedes well-known literary author Stephanie Johnson, in reply to a direct question. Co-founder of the prestigious Auckland Writers Festival, Johnson has written 11 novels, along with plays, poetry, a memoir, and short stories. She is a frequent session-host and panellist at literary events, a Sunday Star-Times short story awards judge and is one of the few New Zealand writers to have a trans-Tasman reputation.
‘‘It is all out in the open now, of course… But am I Lily Woodhouse?’’ she asks herself in a more philosophical way. ‘‘Yes, I suppose I am.’’
Jarulan by the River is a 425-page novel that was released by HarperCollins on July 1. It was written, or so the cover announces, by Lily Woodhouse. Inside the back cover the reader discovers that Woodhouse is the pseudonym of ‘‘an award-winning author who has now written this sweeping family saga. She divides her time between Australia and New Zealand’’.
No other clues about the author’s identity were provided for the curious. New Zealand publicity materials offered email interviews with the author only.
Jarulan by the River is a story that traverses both sides of the Tasman over the course of the 20th century. There are passions and property, sex and subterfuge. Peacocks scream. Virginities are taken. There are legitimate and illegitimate children. Races mingle. Captive koalas whimper and Rotorua spa-baths steam.
It seemed that Woodhouse had done both press and radio interviews for the Australian media in which her personal details exactly matched Johnson’s own.
Some interviews were accompanied by mysteriously-cropped images showing only the author’s eyes.
However, one blog post ran the same image without cropping. It was very clearly Johnson.
‘‘I just wanted to try something new,’’ Johnson explains. ‘‘For this one, I wanted to try something different.’’
From its cover illustration with its lush tropical mansion, river and pelican, to its back-cover hype – ‘‘Rich, epic, and sensuous, brimming with wildlife, love, beauty, babies, ill-deeds, revenge, and unions – illicit and condoned…’’ – Jarulan by the River is a novel that aims for a wide audience.
For Johnson, this doesn’t mean that the quality must be lost.
‘‘The old idea was that in commercial fiction the language wasn’t important but the story was,’’ she explains. ‘‘Sometimes when you read commercial fiction it seemed stodgy, as if it was written with a cloth ear, but, see, I don’t think commercial fiction has to be like that. It can be well-written.
‘‘When I first called myself Lily Woodhouse and sent it off, it was fine and dandy and I hadn’t thought it through. I thought the book would just get rejected. I didn’t for one moment think it wouldn’t be. You should never imagine for one moment that anything you write is going to be published.
‘‘It was accepted, and then I got really worried, and I tried to change the name, and to give myself a different surname, and they came back and said ‘No, no, no, we like Lily Woodhouse. It has a lovely ring to it.’
‘‘Then I said that it’s my married name and in New Zealand, it is like two degrees of separation and I’ll be
"When I first called myself Lily Woodhouse and sent it [Jarulan by the River] off, it was fine and dandy and I hadn't thought it through. I thought the book would just get rejected. I didn't for one moment think it wouldn't be." Stephanie Johnson
found out immediately.
‘‘The pseudonym is a timehonoured literary tradition,’’ she adds. ‘‘I thought if it had been put in from a publisher, under my own name, they might not have bought it. Then they liked it but they insisted on finding out who I was and so my agent told them, and according to her they were delighted.
‘‘I said I would try it, but that I wanted to stay safe, that I didn’t want to be uncovered with this one. But maybe when I publish another one then maybe at the back it could say that ‘Stephanie Johnson etc’… But I just wanted to test it and see how different it would be, but it hasn’t lasted very long…’’
Writing under pseudonyms is not an uncommon practice. In 2011 the Sunday Star-Times revealed that New Zealand’s award-winning crime-writer Alix Bosco was actually playwright Greg McGee, the author of Foreskin’s Lament.
Johnson had also provided the Australian publishers with her photograph.
‘‘Previously there has been an iron curtain that hangs midway across the Tasman and I foolishly thought they can have that – and it was an old photograph of me too,’’ she laughs. ‘‘I think I’m in my early forties in that photograph.
‘‘So the whole thing from the very beginning has been a bit of an experiment. I do love writing in that very lush sort of way.’’
Johnson also quotes an Australian literary critic stating that ‘‘story’’ is often an unwelcome guest at literary festivals.
‘‘In some ways when I look back on my career I think that I have been out of step with the times because I have been writing these very story-rich novels, which were going out under a literary imprint.’’
Jarulan by the River with its mysteries, obscured parentage, blacksheep sons, inheritances, mixed-race relationships, and exotic landscapes is very definitely story-rich.
‘‘I don’t want it to be seen just as a bodice-ripper,’’ she says referring to novels of wish-fulfilling romance aimed at a woman’s market.
‘‘There is a lot more to the novel than that… But it is the question now of where do we fit a book into all these time-honoured literary divisions that don’t seem to make sense any more.’’
Will there be another Lily Woodhouse novel?
It seems Johnson already has plans for the next, which will be set at the base of the New South Wales Blue Mountains in 1950.