Joy Cowley had already gained a reputation in and beyond New Zealand as a writer of short stories and as a novelist when she went on to specialize in writing for children, becoming internationally famous for the four hundred or more graded readers and dozens of trade books she has written for primary (i.e., elementary) school children. She has also written “chapter books” for older children, and novels for children in and approaching the “young adult” (YA) category. Films have been made of her 1967 novel Nest in a Falling Tree (which was re-scripted as the 1971 horror movie The Night Digger by Roald Dahl), of her 1981 children’s story The Silent One (released as a movie in 1985), and of “The Silk” (1965), her most famous short story for adults (released as a short film in 2012). Her numerous personal awards include the award in 1983 of an honorary doctorate from Massey University, the Margaret Mahy Medal and Lecture Award in 1992-1993, the OBE in 2002, the Roberta Long Medal for culturally diverse children’s literature (Alabama, USA) in 2004, and the A.W. Reed Award for Contribution to New Zealand Literature in 2005. In 2010 she won the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction, and in 2011 she was chosen to deliver the Janet Frame Memorial Lecture. She has been a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit since 2010.
Born Cassia Joy Summers in the provincial town of Levin, New Zealand, on 7 August 1936, she was the eldest of the five children of Scotsman Peter Summers and Cassia Gedge. Her mother had been born in New Zealand, but her ethnic background was Swedish. Childhoods are always formative, but the childhoods of writers for children have a special interest. Cowley has evoked hers in her invaluable memoir Navigation (2010). Her father suffered from heart disease and her mother from mental illness. The couple fought, but their relationship had a certain warmth, and they loved and cared for their children. The ambiguous flavour of Cowley’s family life is reflected (or, at least, refracted) in most of her novels for adults, and in some of her novels for older children as well—most recently in The Bakehouse (2015), set during World War II (when Cowley herself had been a child).
The family shifted houses and locations frequently in Joy’s early years, although they remained within the regions of Wellington (spending time with their paternal grandmother in the capital city proper) and Manawatu-Whanganui, the geographical area that adjoins the Wellington region to the north-west, living at various times in Levin, Otaki, and Foxton. The changing background may have fixed the early memories that surface in the vivid settings of so many of her works. The neighbours on both sides of their house when they lived in Foxton were Māori, and it is possible that they inspired the Māori characters that populate many of her novels and tales. Foxton is inland, but only a twenty-minute bicycle ride from the coastal setting of Foxton Beach, where Joy used to accompany her father on fishing expeditions, and which may have inspired her life-long love of the sea and her predilection for coastal settings. The Pacific setting of her children’s story The Silent One was inspired by a 1971 visit to Fiji.
At Otaki Primary School Cowley proved slow at learning to read. Her breakthrough at the age of nearly nine was with The Story of Ping by Marjorie Flack (illustrated by Kurt Wiese). Cowley’s subsequent dedication to writing that would help children learn to read had a foundation in this early experience, although it was to be reinforced when her son Edward also had difficulty in learning to read. Cowley moved on from Ping to become a voracious reader, consuming the European classics available to her in the public libraries of, first, Otaki and then Foxton. She also became a frequent contributor of stories to the children’s pages of the Foxton newspaper and the Manawatu Daily Times, although she had in her early childhood been much more occupied by drawing and painting, demonstrating an aesthetic sensibility that was to extend to all the arts, including music. (Cowley was to begin learning to play the piano at the age of 61.) Such a sensibility was to be shared by many of her fictional characters, including in particular the architectural designer Delia, who is one of the two main protagonists of the novel Classical Music (1999). Cowley went on to Foxton District High School, but transferred for the fourth form (the second high-school year) to what was thought to be the more rigorously academic Palmerston North Girls’ High School. She now had to spend more than three hours a day travelling to and from school by bus. Notwithstanding her slow start (and frequent corporal punishment with the “strap” that was used in most New Zealand schools at the time), her creative and intellectual promise were recognized by a number of her teachers. But, depending as it did on her father’s sickness benefit, the family had always struggled financially. Joy (who had already been supplementing the family’s income by, for instance, crocheting scarves for sale at a local shop) would have been required by her parents to leave school at the end of her fifth form year, had it not been for the intervention of her school principal.
In order that she could continue into the sixth form while taking paying work (this was as editor of the children’s page of the Manawatu Daily Times), Cowley lived as a boarder (i. e., a lodger, or paying guest) in the family home of a Baptist minister in Palmerston North. Joy’s parents, her mother in particular, were deeply religiou Their church was Presbyterian. Joy attended the Presbyterian Sunday School in the mornings, and in the afternoons either the Salvation Army Sunday School, or, “every second Sunday”, the Methodist one—in the hope of qualifying for the book prizes awarded annually by all three (Navigation 178). She went on to Bible Class, and even became a Sunday-School teacher. The morally repressive aspect of Presbyterianism (an aspect that she was to expose in Nest in a Falling Tree) was reinforced by her parents’ warnings of the snares of the devil. Cowley was to react against the God-fearing religiosity of her mother, while retaining the transcendentalism that characterizes, or even defines, religious belief. She eventually converted to Catholicism in 1982. Her interest in Catholicism was already evident in the adult novel Of Men and Angels (1972). A strong affection for ordinary priests and nuns suffuses the late novel Holy Days (2007), and her oeuvre includes a clutch of volumes of “spiritual reflections”—hymns, parables, and prayer But her attitude to religion is essentially non-sectarian.
Leaving school, Joy wanted to become a journalist (she had been offered a cadetship by the Manawatu Daily Times), but her parents pressed her to take up an apprenticeship as a pharmacist. She enjoyed the day-to-day contact with people that her life as a chemist in small-town Foxton provided, and she was to draw on this phase to good effect in Of Men and Angels, whose main character is a pharmacist. During this period she acquired a motorcycle, and also learned to fly a Tiger Moth. Her proclivity for the acquisition of technical and manual skills has continued unabated. Her 2013 YA novel Dunger represents as inimical to physical survival and psychic health the overuse of electronic devices beloved of teenagers.
Pregnant with their first child, Joy married Edward (Ted) Cowley in 1956. The couple raised four children on their dairy farm at Whakarongo (near Palmerston North), where they were for a time idyllically happy—as farm life generally turns out to be in her picture books. It was when she was a young mother that Cowley began publishing her stories for children in the New Zealand School Journal. Published by the Department of Education for nation-wide dissemination, the Journal of those days is now regarded with affection and respect for its encouragement of New Zealand writers. She was also publishing her adult short stories, at first in papers like the New Zealand Dairy Exporter and the Home Journal. Aiming higher, she began submitting short stories to the New Zealand Listener, the weekly guide to radio programming and an important vehicle for commentary on politics, society and the arts. Eventually, some were accepted. In 1964 her short story “The Moth” was published in Landfall (then New Zealand’s only literary journal). A 1965 Listener piece, her now-famous and much-anthologised story “The Silk” was republished in the American magazine Short Story International. Here it attracted the attention of Anne Hutchens, an editor for Doubleday, who contacted Cowley with a request for a novel. In response, she wrote Nest in a Falling Tree, the first of the series of the five adult novels that she was to produce at regular intervals over the next decade. The Doubleday connection also led to the publication in 1969, as a children’s picture book, of her anti-war fable, The Duck in the Gun. She had entered this story in a 1967 Price Milburn competition, which it had won, but had remained unpublished.
The personal triumph of the publication of Nest coincided with a particularly stressful phase of Cowley’s personal life. By 1966 her husband had embarked on a relationship with another woman, and she and Ted were divorced in 1968. As she has recalled in a recent interview with Bess Manson, she thought at the time that she was going to lose her children. Feeling (as she puts it in Navigation) that “[her] life was also at an end” (89), she attempted suicide. But her experience of almost dying was, as she describes it, an encounter with eternity. She found a happiness that she appears never to have lost. For a time, however, she continued to write what in Navigation she has characterized almost dismissively as her “bleak book[s]” (108). It may be significant that she had already addressed suicide in her 1965 short story “House with a View”. The Mandrake Root (1975) begins with the return home of its main character after a period of hospitalization arising from a suicide attempt. In neither of these fictional treatments is suicide associated with the illumination that was contingent upon Cowley’s own crisis. Her output from the 1980s has been generally affirmative in tone. This having been said, her works have continued to take account of the realities of life, realities that tend to include psychological pain and (perhaps most of all) death. This is true even of her books for younger readers (though not, understandably, for the educational “readers”, or basal books, as discussed below). The picture book Brodie (2001) treats the death from cancer of the eponymous child character through the eyes of a class-mate.
In 1970 Cowley married Malcolm Mason, a distinguished ex-soldier, a writer, and an accountant. Family life was soon to include holidays on a 165-acre property in Fish Bay, in the Marlborough Sounds. She had already leased a cottage there for two years, when in 1973 she bought the site with the funds she had acquired from her sale of the film rights for Nest in a Falling Tree. Dunger stands out among those many of her works for children that are set in the Sounds.
By the late 1970s her reputation was secure, and her work was soon to garner a series of awards. The first would be for The Silent One, which won the Children’s Book of the Year award in 1982. (This particular award was at the time funded by the government, although it has had several named sponsorships since.)
Her career was to take a new and immensely productive direction in 1978 when the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education (later “Learning Media”) began a process of revising and expanding its “Ready-to-Read” series of graded school readers. Inspired by the conviction that such texts needed, above all, to be engaging, the editors appealed to recognized children’s writers for material. Inevitably, these included Cowley, who conceived the first of her now-famous Greedy Cat stories for inclusion in the series. But the consultative character of the process meant that publication was delayed for a matter of years. In the interim, Cowley turned her mind to independent publication, and was advised by June Melser (who had had previous editorial experience with School Publications) to show her work to Wendy Pye of Shortland Publications, a division of New Zealand News. Pye went on to produce the “Story Box” collection of stories of the “Ready-to-Read” type, with Cowley, and, eventually, with other authors, all of whom worked in close conjunction with editors and illustrators. Marketed by Pye, now heading her own company, Sunshine Books, this was a huge international success. Since the mid-1980s Cowley has published more than 800 graded readers, and since the 1990s her regular output has included trade picture books as well as institutional texts. Her 2003 picture-book Mrs Wishy Washy’s Farm has sold over four million copies. Although, by then, writing for those learning to read and for beginner readers dominated her career, at the beginning of the 1990s Cowley turned her hand to writing the script for the 52-minute television film Mother Tongue (which was shot in 1992).
Her personal web-site www.joycowley.com is invaluable for its regularly up-dated listings of her complete works. The “Selected Works” list linked to this article includes all her adult novels, but some highlights only of her numerous junior and young adult fiction works.
Malcolm had died in 1985. In 1989 Cowley married Terry Coles, a former Catholic priest. Together, Joy and Terry held spiritual retreats on the Fish Bay property. But Terry’s failing health dictated a shift to Wellington in 2004, and the couple now live in the small Wairarapa town of Featherston, to the north-east of Wellington. She now has thirteen grandchildren.
Cowley’s career as a writer has been yoked, increasingly, with her vocations as a philanthropist and as a promoter of children’s writing and reading. In 2002 the Storylines Children’s Literature Foundation, in conjunction with the publisher Scholastic New Zealand, established an award in her name; it is designed to foster the production of excellent picture books by New Zealand writers. In 2004 she became a patron of the Foundation, and she also serves as a trustee of its Charitable Trust.
In her evocation, in Navigation, of mornings in Fish Bay, Cowley writes: “everything is so wet with dew it is as though the sea has crept up over the land in the night” (15). This unconscious borrowing from the famous opening of Katherine Mansfield’s masterpiece “At the Bay” (“A heavy dew had fallen”; “It looked as though the sea had beaten up softly in the darkness, as though one immense wave had come . . .”, [441]) raises the question of Mansfield’s influence on the short stories. Cowley may well have learned from Mansfield how to use what might be regarded as symbolic “props”; the moth in “The Moth” is reminiscent in several respects of the fly in Mansfield’s “The Fly”. Where Mansfield, in, again, “At the Bay”, has Mrs Fairfield project her sense of fulfilment on a bowl of nasturtiums, the focal character of Cowley’s short story “Apple Wine” (1980), the sensitive middle-aged Ellen, projects her melancholia on to a rose in a vase that, having made a sound “like a sigh”, loses all its petals (92). The length of silk that gives its name to “The Silk” is one of these writ large. It has, as David Norton has noted, “the forces of the story concentrated in it” (62). Cowley’s stories also follow Mansfield’s in the poetic subtlety of their shaping (“The Silk” being something of an exception here, thanks to its overt plotting). The stories are also, like Mansfield’s, preoccupied (though not exclusively) with mortality, and loss in general. Cowley’s thematic seriousness does not preclude humour. This tends to be mediated through dialogue. Her ear for spoken idioms is evident in the gentle yet painful satirical representation of genteel middle-aged women in “Apple Wine”, and in her even sharper (but still touching) representations of a whole range of tourists in her 1978 story “The Colonel and South America”.
The novels fall into two groups. Those written in the 1960s and 1970s are of their time in their unblinking realism and in their dark take on contemporary mores, notably on what has been described as the “puritanism” of post-World War II New Zealand. Cowley has accounted for these novels as both generic and therapeutic, yet her retrospective dismissiveness of them is surely unjustified. Roald Dahl, turning Nest in a Falling Tree into a thriller as he did, testifies to the tension with which Cowley imbues her story of the love affair of a potentially embittered older woman with an adolescent boy. Neither of the two characters are idealized, although the society that would (and to some extent does) constrain them is Cowley’s chief satirical target. Like all the early novels, Nest is significant not only for its place in the history of the New Zealand novel as such, but also for its documentation of cultural history broadly conceived. Who now remembers “tins of jam”, “sticky fly-paper”, or “communion cards”, which feature more-or-less incidentally in Nest in a Falling Tree (46, 47, 64). Man of Straw (1972) addresses infidelity and sexual malaise from the initially innocent point of view of a pubescent girl.
Published in the same year, Of Men and Angels is structured dialectically; its female characters (who are, respectively, Catholic and agnostic, barren and fertile) represent antagonistic and doubtful attitudes towards abortion (which was not to be legalized in New Zealand until 1977) and on sexual morality. By the end of the novel, however, they have united to become the parents of a child (the biological father doomed to remain for ever ignorant of his role).
While it is made clear that these women are not sexual partners, Cowley’s next novel, The Mandrake Root (1975), treats male homosexuality with marked sympathy, although homosexual law reform was not to be enacted in New Zealand for another decade. The novel is centred elsewhere, however. It is concerned with the damaging effects of parental influence. The main character, from whose point of view the story is told, has attempted suicide, and the novel ends with her imminent separation from her family and even New Zealand.
The final novel in this early sequence, The Growing Season (1978), differs from the others in what might be described as its rather more life-affirming character, although paradoxically what it commends is the acceptance of death (death that is not, as it appears in the earlier novels, the product of murder, tragic accident, or suicide).
Twenty years on, in Classical Music, Cowley was to return to the dialectical structure she had adopted for Of Men and Angels. The novel alternates between the points of view of two sisters, who, after a period of personal division (a division projected by the fact that one lives in New York, one in New Zealand), are reconciled in the aftermath of their father’s funeral. Holy Days stands apart. Written from the point of view of a child whose mother has died, it represents (in conscious opposition to the image engendered by the sexual abuse scandals of the late 1980’s onwards) a parish priest and a posse of nuns as positive parental substitutes.
Cowley has represented her life as a narrative pivoting on her attempted suicide, which began (we may presume) in deathly darkness, while ending in a flood of eternal light. To identify her earlier works with the former and her later works with the latter would be too simple. For one thing, the novels that she has dismissed as her “bleak book[s]” were written on both sides of the crisis of 1968. For another, there is always a glimpse of light in Cowley’s darkness, and a glimpse of darkness in her light. It remains the case, however, that her work invites interpretation in terms of alternations and dichotomies. Several of her novels are constructed around alternating points of view. The most recent of Cowley’s novels for older children, Dunger (2013) and The Bakehouse (2015), invite consideration as a pair, a kind of diptych. Dunger represents grandparents through the eyes of their (initially sceptical) grandchildren as a positive and constructive influence, while The Bakehouse is framed by an encounter between a racially prejudiced grandfather who has been unable to confront his own past, and the Māori grandson he has never known—and never will get to know.
The chapter books for younger children move at a faster pace and eschew introspection. Horror is projected outwards. This is sometimes in the form of classic “baddies”, and sometimes in inanimate objects like the ghastly cesspit adjoining the fearsome slaughterhouse from which the female hero Hannah saves her beloved horse in Bow Down Shadrach (1991). As for the stories for children learning to read, and the other picture books, these probably owe much of their success to Cowley’s convictions that their protagonists (whether animals, train engines, or actual children) must be child-like, and that they should inspire hope. It is interesting to observe the position of the child as amused observer in, for instance, the Greedy Cat books. Together the naughty but, by the same token, resourceful animal represents what might be regarded as the physical instincts that trouble yet energise the child, and the parent (or parents) the super-ego that urges control. Katie, the child, is—like the reader—positioned, and enjoyably so, between both.
Cowley addressed budding children’s writers in her 2010 online pamphlet entitled, tellingly, Writing from the Heart: How to Write for Children. There can be no doubt that she writes out of a personal understanding of life as she has experienced it. But she is also an accomplished technician. In the “Letter from Joy Cowley” that she addressed to children in 2001 she advises the child editing his or her own story as follows:
Is the way of telling interesting? Does it have fast and slow movements like music? How have you balanced dialogue and narrative? Look at the action . . . . You can make it sound fast by reducing adjectives and using short sentences with bare nouns and verbs. Or, in the quieter moments, you can slow down your story by using longer sentences and more description.
Her prescription is matched by her own admirably flexible prose. As Jane Stafford has observed, writing in response to Cowley’s Introduction to her Collected Stories, her emphasis on intuition (and inspiration) exists in almost paradoxical combination with her down-to-earth representations of writing as a craft (78-80). In her 2011 Janet Frame Memorial Lecture she offers a shrewd and illuminating picture of the development of the national literary context from which she herself has emerged. New Zealand had produced very little writing for children when she was a child. Now, however, she has many colleagues in the field, the late Margaret Mahy having been the most notable among them.
Since the early 1990s, Cowley’s books have featured regularly as finalists and winners in the national book awards. (A full account of these is provided on the New Zealand Book Council website under Cowley’s name.) Nonetheless, although it is widely reviewed, her work has received only a modest amount of academic attention. There are articles and mentions in book chapters, but no monograph.
Works Cited
Cowley, Joy. “Apple Wine”. The Complete Short Stories.
Auckland: HarperCollins, 2007. Pp. 79-93.
Cowley, Joy. “Letter from Joy Cowley: Advice for Budding Authors”.
2001. Accessible at www.joycowley.com/advice.shtml.
Cowley, Joy. Navigation: A Memoir. Auckland: Penguin NZ,
2010.
Mansfield, Katherine. “At the Bay”. The Stories of Katherine
Mansfield. Ed Antony Alpers. Auckland: Oxford University
Press, 1984. Pp. 441-69.
Manson, Bess. “National Portrait: Joy Cowley the Storyteller”.
2016.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/76942274/national-portrait-author-joy-cowley-the-storyteller.
Norton, David. “Life on the Edge of Death: Janet Frame’s ‘Winter
Garden’, Joy Cowley’s ‘The Silk’ and Maurice Gee’s ‘A Glorious
Morning, Comrade’”. Climate 29 (Autumn, 1979): 54-5.
Stafford, Jane. “Beginning with the Heart: Six Short Story
Collections by Women”. Landfall 195 (Autumn 1998):
77-87.
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Citation: Walls, Kathryn. "Joy Cowley". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 August 2017 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1047, accessed 15 January 2025.]
