Literary writer gets steamy with novel
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.
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.
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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.
The book’s accompanying press materials state she is available for email interview only.
Writing under a pseudonym is nothing new. David Cornwell is better known as John Le Carre, author of several novels, including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy set in the duplicitous world of espionage. Horror writer Stephen King also wrote as Richard Bachman. So, who is Lily Woodhouse? Stephanie Johnson is the wellknown co-founder of the successful Auckland Writer’s 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.
But the coup-de-grace is the fact that the online interview with Lily Woodhouse is illustrated with an uncaptioned portrait of Johnson herself.
Was it a change of career-path? Did Johnson want to abandon a persona and style in which she was type-cast? Or was it a writer’s novelistic experiment?
To date, Johnson has not responded to inquiries.