Johnson outed as bodice ripper’s novelist
In late May, a novel, Jarulan by the River, was published by Harper Collins and sent to media outlets for review – but it wasn’t quite what it seemed.
Set in both New Zealand and Australia, the book is highpitched, Gothic, nearhallucinatory, and erotic. It is a passionate and spectacular multigenerational drama, filled with screeching cockatoos and lurking snakes in one country and storms sweeping down Auckland’s Waitakeres and the steaming waters of the Rotorua Bath House in another.
Sex broods in a disintegrating mansion in the heat of northern New South Wales. A 16-year-old servant is routinely bedded by her much older master. A despised 18-year-old German lady’s maid catches the eye of a property owner. A journey is made in search of a ‘‘black-sheep’’ family member. Does a distant marae in the Bay of Plenty hold an answer?
It is an intelligent ‘‘bodice ripper’’’ of a novel, sprawling across a century of Australasian life, with a heightened sense of gesture and a pacey series of revelations.
The author is Lily Woodhouse, but the back-page biography reveals the name is a pseudonym for ‘‘an award-winning author’’ who ‘‘divides her time between Australia and New Zealand’’.
Writing under a pseudonym is nothing new. David Cornwell is better known as John Le Carre. Horror writer Stephen King also wrote as Richard Bachman. So, who is Lily Woodhouse? Reviewer David Hill in the New Zealand Herald flippantly listed Eleanor Catton, Catherine Chidgey or Fiona Kidman as possible suspects.
In fact, Woodhouse’s writing with its skilled stagey lushness and taut erotic sensibility is unlike the work of any of the writers listed.
There was, however, one possibility not canvassed by Hill.
Stephanie Johnson is the wellknown co-founder of the successful Auckland Writers Festival. She is the author of more than 11 novels, numerous short stories, plays and a memoir. Johnson is a frequent panellist and host at Auckland literary events
Like the mysterious Lily Woodhouse, Johnson has divided her time between Australia and New Zealand and written about the phenomenon of being a transTasman writer.
She has lived in northern New South Wales, the location of the fictitious Jarulan.
Johnson is also married to Tim Woodhouse, an Australian-born film and TV editor. Woodhouse is her married name, though she continues to write under the name Stephanie Johnson.
As if to cinch the identification, buried down in the internet search listings is an interview with the pseudonymous Lily Woodhouse. The sketchy personal details in the interview match Johnson’s own including the information that her son, a musician, lives in Melbourne.
But the coup-de-grace is the fact that the online interview with Lily Woodhouse is illustrated with an uncaptioned portrait of Johnson herself.
It was almost like she wanted to be found.
‘‘I had an odd sense throughout the writing of the book that it was somehow writing itself,’’ she tells the online interviewer. ‘‘It was risky, throw-all-caution-to-thewind feeling, which I very much enjoyed.’’
Was it a change of career-path? Did Johnson want to abandon a persona and style in which she was typecast? Or was it a writer’s novelistic experiment?
To date, Johnson has not responded to inquiries. Lily Johnson, however, has promised her readers another novel, this time set at the foot of Australia’s Blue Mountains in 1950.