The Timaru girl who overheard that she could write
1913–1985
Short-story writer, poet and editor
When Helen Shaw was about twelve, she overheard a teacher praising a fairy story she had written.
The comment was apparently not made to Helen. She happened to hear it. Yet decades later, it remained part of the account of how she first recognised that writing might be more than a private pleasure.
Helen Lilian Shaw was born in Timaru on 20 February 1913. She was the only child of Jessie Helen Gow and solicitor Walter Shaw. Within months, her father’s financial and professional life collapsed publicly. He was imprisoned in 1913 for embezzlement and fraud, then killed in France in September 1916. Helen grew up in Timaru with her mother and grandparents.
There is a temptation to make those events explain everything that followed. A disgraced and absent father, a house full of adults, a solitary child among books, then fiction concerned with old houses, family tensions and unspoken pain. It makes a remarkably neat pattern.
History is rarely that obliging.
What can be said securely is that her grandfather, South Canterbury school inspector James Gibson Gow, taught her to read before she began school. Helen later described reading as opening another dimension. She attended Waimataitai School and Timaru Girls’ High School, and her biographer records that by the time she left school she was already set on literature.
In 1932, during the Depression, Helen entered Canterbury College and teacher training. Teaching offered educated women a recognisable profession and a dependable income, or at least the hope of one. Yet after completing her BA in 1936, Helen left that expected path.
By 1937, her children’s stories were appearing in the Press Junior. She entered the literary and artistic circles of Christchurch at a time when New Zealand writers were arguing over what a distinct national literature ought to sound like.
Helen never fitted particularly tidily into the louder versions of that story. Her writing was imaginative, inward and sometimes slightly strange. Her stories returned to memory, ageing relations, dreamy young women and households in which important matters remained unsaid.
In 1941, she married Prague-born photographer Frank Hofmann, who had escaped Nazi-occupied Europe and reached New Zealand in 1940. Their marriage brought Helen into another network of artists, migrants and intellectuals. It also brought domestic responsibilities. She raised two sons and often wrote late at night, finding time around household and family life.
Her first adult story appeared in 1943. The Orange-tree followed in 1957 and The Gipsies, and Other Stories in 1978. She also edited work about Frank Sargeson and helped preserve the correspondence and reputation of D’Arcy Cresswell.
Her biographer identifies Timaru’s older homes and relationships as important sources for her fiction. That does not make every invented house a disguised Timaru address. It does mean that she carried something of the town with her: its interiors, its respectability, its bookshelves and perhaps its silences.
The most useful question her life leaves us is not whether Timaru “made” Helen Shaw. It is what might have happened had that teacher not spoken warmly about the fairy story, or had Helen not happened to hear.
What changed because of her work: She contributed a distinctive, imaginative and female-centred voice to New Zealand literature and helped preserve the work of other writers.