Lady (Mary Anne) Barker

Born Mary Anne Stewart in Spanish Town, Jamaica, in 1831, she was educated in England and later became Lady Barker through marriage. She is best known as an English author whose writing drew on years spent moving through different parts of the British Empire, especially New Zealand.

Her reputation rests largely on Station Life in New Zealand (1870), a lively account of high-country sheep-station life that helped make her one of the most recognizable literary voices writing about colonial New Zealand. Later in life she was also known as Lady Broome, and her memoirs and travel writing ranged beyond New Zealand to other parts of the empire.

What makes her work stand out is its direct, personal tone: she wrote from experience, with an eye for everyday detail, hardship, landscape, and the oddness of colonial life. She died in London on March 6, 1911.