STEWART, Mary Anne 1831-1911
(Mary Anne Barker, Lady Barker, Lady Broome)

PERSONAL:

Born in 1831, in Jamaica; died on March 6, 1911; daughter of Walter George Stewart (island secretary of Jamaica); married Captain George Barker, 1852 (died 1861); married Frederick Napier Broome (sheep farmer, colonial secretary, and poet) in 1865; children (with Barker): two sons, including Walter George; children (with Broome): Guy, Louis.

CAREER:

Travel writer, 1870-1904.

WRITINGS:

Station Life in New Zealand, Macmillan (London, England and New York, NY), 1870, Lent (New York, NY), 1872.

Stories About:—, Macmillan (London, England and New York, NY), 1871.

A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters, Macmillan (London, England and New York, NY), 1871.

Spring Comedies, Macmillan (London, England and New York, NY), 1871.

Travelling About over New and Old Ground, Routledge (London, England), 1872.

Ribbon Stories, Macmillan (London, England and New York, NY), 1872.

Station Amusements in New Zealand, Hunt (London, England), 1873.

Holiday Stories for Boys and Girls, Routledge (London, England), 1873.

Boys, Routledge (London, England), 1874.

First Lessons in the Principles of Cooking, Macmillan (London, England and New York, NY), 1874.

Sybil's Book, Macmillan (London, England and New York, NY), 1874.

This Troublesome World; or, "Bet of Stow", Hatchards (London, England), 1875.

Houses and Housekeeping: A Fireside Gossip upon Home and Its Comforts, Hunt (London, England), 1876.

A Year's Housekeeping in South Africa, Macmillan (London, England and New York, NY), 1877, republished as Life in South Africa, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1877.

The Bedroom and Boudoir, Macmillan (London, England and New York, NY), 1878.

The White Rat, and Some Other Stories, Macmillan (London, England and New York, NY), 1880.

Letters to Guy, Macmillan (London, England and New York, NY), 1885.

(As Lady Broome) Harry Treverton, His Tramps and Troubles Told by Himself, Routledge (London, England), 1889.

Colonial Memories, Smith, Elder (London, England), 1904.

OTHER

(Editor as Mary Anne Broome) Lady Annie Brassey, The Last Voyage, Longmans, Green (London, England), 1889.

Contributor to periodical publication Macmillan's Magazine.

SIDELIGHTS:

Mary Anne Stewart, better-known as Lady Mary Anne Barker, is best remembered for her travel writing, in which she describes the landscape of the British colonies from a colonist's perspective. Some of Barker's writing was successful as children's literature; but as Carol Huebscher Rhoades noted in Dictionary of Literary Biography: "Many of [Barker's] stories derive from her travel experiences, and those books, even if written ostensibly for children, were aimed also at adult readers in the British leisured classes." Barker's writing tends to depict the colonial life—sheep farming, local customs—in stories that glorify British colonialism, offering some useful information along with much patriotic cooing. In Travelling about over New and Old Ground, for example, she exclaims, "It is exactly like England! That is the highest praise the exile can bestow on any place."

Barker was born Mary Anne Stewart in 1831. Her father, Walter George Stewart, was a British gentleman serving as island secretary in Jamaica, where Barker was born. Barker grew up between England and its colonies; though she was raised in Jamaica, she was educated in England. In many ways, Barker's early history set a pattern for her future efforts: throughout Barker's life, she seems always to have attempted to bring English culture to the colonies while translating the colonies' culture to a British audience. At the age of twenty-one, Barker married her first husband, Captain George Barker (later Sir Barker); she raised her two sons in England while her husband worked in India until his death in 1861.

By 1865, Barker had met and married her second husband, Frederick Napier Broome (later Sir Broome). She left her two children in England and set out for New Zealand with Broome; together, the couple planned to run a sheep farm. The farm failed, and Barker and her young husband returned to England. They supported themselves by writing: he as a poet and journalist, she as a travel writer. Barker's first book, Station Life in New Zealand, is based on the letters Barker wrote to her sister while in New Zealand. Rhoades explained, "Barker's book synthesizes two opposing messages. On one hand, she stresses the opportunities in New Zealand for hardworking, progressive settlers who can make the most of the abundant resources the country has. Echoing one theme of earlier colonial literature such as Butler's First Year in Canterbury Settlement, Barker discourages the colonial settlement dreams of educated gentlemen who have money but lack fitness or desire for work. On the other hand, her narrative describes, for the most part, the leisured life of people who spend mornings reading and writing and who then divert themselves with horse riding, pig hunting, fishing, and picnics."

Station Life in New Zealand, which became Barker's most popular book, offers a view of the British "domestication" of New Zealand—for Barker, this "domestication" is an unmitigated good. Barker describes her efforts to spread her method of Christian worship to the native New Zealanders, as well as her effort to reinforce the old-world habits of the British colonizers living in New Zealand. She is particularly careful to describe how she and her husband developed Anglican services in the bush, and how they would try to share religious literature with shepherds in the area. As Rhoades suggested: "Barker's … New Zealand stories are intended not simply to amuse and inform but to reassure readers at home that the colonies are nurturing and, most of all, maintaining the sacred bonds of British domesticity. The close, colonial ties to England and the queen."

Since Station Life became a hit with the British audience back home, Barker followed it with another such work, Station Amusements in New Zealand. In it, Barker relates her attempts to bring British habits to the new land; in one section, she describes a day of whipping down hills on a toboggan following a New Zealand snowstorm—for her, the new landscape brings new zest to an old pastime. Barker suggests that though the rough climate offers challenges to those wishing to cling to their British ways, it offers excitement and a sense of mission as well. Reviewers were generally pleased by the work, and by Barker's later collections of children's stories, such as Spring Comedies, A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters, Stories About:—, Ribbon Stories, Holiday Stories for Boys and Girls, Boys, and Sybil's Book. In each of these collections, Barker describes the process of domestication: in the stories, settlers are found domesticating foreign lands, domesticating children, and domesticating themselves as they learn to live without servants, making British comfort with their own hands. During this period, Barker also spent time in England as a cooking school teacher and as an editor, teaching others to follow British traditions in London as well as abroad.

Barker continued to write in this mode—teaching English domestic traditions—after a brief stay in Natal, where her husband was posted as colonial secretary. In 1877, she published A Year's Housekeeping in South Africa, in which she described her efforts to make a British life in her husband's new land. But the book reveals the kind of ideas at the heart of Barker's colonial writing. In it, she describes the African people in truly crass and derogatory language—so much so that even her British reviewers were discomfited. Rhoades pointed out: "Her political and social naiveté is particularly galling in view of her wide travels and her position as the wife of a government official: 'it is not any one's business to laugh at people suffering under the injustice of English officials' [a review in the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review ]."

Barker's books, throughout her life, attempt to suggest the benefits of bringing English beliefs and customs to the colonies, and her books consistently depict the importance and life-affirming potential of colonialism. For that reason, Barker often evades some of the more troubling events that disturbed her travels. Rhoades noted: "Barker portrays the colony in idealistic terms: it is, like New Zealand, a better England. Unpleasantries such as the burning of Governor Broome in effigy midway through his term and the question of the place of the Aborigines within the new society are glossed over or, more often, not discussed at all.… Barker is uncritical of the treatment the Aborigines receive from the whites … she excellently describes the lives and perspectives of middle-and upper-middle class British colonialists, and she ignores or stereotypes other social groups."

Barker's work suggests much about the perspective of those working to turn the colonies into a "better England." A taste for adventure, a steadfast belief in English values, and a certain blindness characterizes Barker's narratives of domestication, but through them the reader is offered a more complex picture of the colonialist's mission. She died on March 6, 1911—a world traveler who, in some ways, never left home.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 166: British Travel Writers, 1837-1875, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Gross, Konrad and Wolfgang Klooss, English Literature of the Dominions: Writings on Australia, Canada and New Zealand, Koenigshausen & Neumann (Wurzburg, Germany), 1981.*