Lady (Mary Anne) Barker

Born Mary Anne Stewart in Spanish Town, Jamaica, in 1831, she was educated in England and became Lady Barker after marrying George Robert Barker, a British army officer. After being widowed, she married Frederick Napier Broome in 1865. Her life included long periods in New Zealand, where she and her husband tried sheep farming in Canterbury, experiences that shaped her best-known writing.

She is remembered above all for Station Life in New Zealand (1870), a lively account drawn from her years on a remote sheep station. She later followed it with Station Amusements in New Zealand and wrote other books and articles based on her travels and colonial life. Readers have long valued her clear, conversational style and the way she captured both the hardships and pleasures of everyday life.

Later known as Mary Anne Broome, Lady Broome, she continued to write while living in different parts of the British Empire. She died in London in 1911, but her New Zealand books remain the works most closely associated with her name.