The Heart of the Bush. (1910). Edith Searle. Grossmann

VERY SCARCE. Edith Searle Grossmann's 1910 novel

The Heart of the Bush is a romance, that most conservative of genres that tidies up the problems it posits. Romance is a favourite genre of colonial writers because of the way it allows the difficulties of settlement to be examined and resolved. Unlike earlier interracial romances, such as Ranolf and Amohia, The Heart of the Bush offers the reader lovers who are Pakeha and also 'native' in the sense that they are born in New Zealand. The difference between them and the difficulties between them depend on the degree to which and the manner in which they have become indigenous. Adelaide, the heroine of The Heart of the Bush, has been educated in England. Her suitor, Dennis, has remained on her father's New Zealand farm as its manager. Dennis's rough charms and his ease within the landscape are compared to the smooth metropolitan glamour of his rival for Adelaide's affections, the Englishman Horace Brandon: Judged by every civilized standard, Horace Brandon was incomparably the finer man of the two, but he would have been incongruous amongst the mountains and the clouds where Dennis was quite at home.5 Despite her anxiety that the sophisticated Horace might possess Svengali-like powers and mesmerise her into submission 'by some psychic means' (72), Adelaide's choice, early in the novel, is easily made, and involves a rejection of Englishness and propriety: 'I will be a wild girl, untamed, un-English, without taste or principles, a social outcast, a moral reprobate, anything but Horace Brandon's wife,' she cried inwardly.

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