![]() ![]() ![]() While a student, she attended a performance of Allan Wilkie’s Shakespeare Company, and sent him a playscript called The Medallion. At the age of fifteen, she entered art school and planned a career as a painter. Whatever the case, Marsh found whenever she was outside New Zealand that her name was constantly mispronounced Ner-gy-oh, rather than the correct Nyeoh. Other sources say that it is the name of a native flowering tree. Marsh explained to an interviewer many years later that in New Zealand European children often receive native names, and Ngaio-the name by which she was known all her life-can mean either light on the water or little tree bug in the Maori language. Her father came from England, but her mother was from a family that was basically colonial, having come to New Zealand by way of the West Indies. ![]() But perhaps all of this is not so surprising: she brought to her writing the clearsightedness of an outsider-an outsider who could view a scene as a painter and plot with the dramatic sense of a playwright.Įdith Ngaio Marsh was born in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her real interests were painting and the theater. These are not the sort of books I buy to read, she said of the works of other mystery novelists. Paradoxically, Marsh was born and reared far from England and had little interest in detective fiction as a form. These words describe the traditional English mystery and, above all, the novels of Dame Ngaio Marsh (1899-1982). ![]()
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