Jenny Pattrick: Pioneering Novelist

The words “best-selling novelist” sit side by side with the name of Jenny Pattrick. The Wellington writer’s work features week after week after week in the top 10 book lists. So what’s her secret?

Story Lindsey Dawson, Photography Annelies van der Poel

Plenty magazine: Summer 2007

Mention Jenny Pattrick to any bookseller and just watch the smiles break out. Ever since the launch of The Denniston Rose, her historical novel about coal mining life on the wild West Coast, Pattrick has moved truckloads of books.

She writes what reviewers tend to call “rollicking good reads” and her fans are legion. Rose has sold more than 37,000 copies. That’s huge in a country where most fiction titles are lucky to hit sales of 3000. Her sequel, Heart of Coal, has also hit the spot along with her third book, Catching the Current. (Only her last offering, In Touch With Grace, is set in the present.) An Australian publisher has just bought all four of her novels to try there and a screen adaptation of Rose is also in the works.

No one is more surprised and delighted by her success than Pattrick herself. After all, the book trade tends to roll out the most hoop-la for hot young writers. But Pattrick is a grandmother of four who first took up writing because arthritis was getting in the way of her former craft, jewellery making.

At 69, with crisp grey hair and a penetrating gaze, she’s no fresh ingénue. But it’s talent that counts. And last year The Denniston Rose appeared on 22 of New Zealand’s 25 fortnightly bestseller lists, and Heart of Coal on 16. Her publishers are so optimistic about her tales of pioneer derring-do that they have recently re-issued her first two books, printed together in one big illustrated volume.

Packed with old photos that Pattrick has unearthed from many sources, it’s a fat 500 pages.

Local historical fiction was a genre that New Zealand publishers wouldn’t touch a few years ago. “For a long time,” says Random House editor Harriet Allen, “New Zealanders always looked overseas, thinking we didn’t have history worth telling.” But, she says, Pattrick’s “great story-telling skills” came along at the right time to feed the growing appetite for Kiwi tales. The author could be forgiven for crowing – but you won’t hear that from this down-to-earth writer.

As a young mother of three she’d looked for something to do from home and opted for jewellery making. “I started in the hippie days in the 70s, mainly self taught, making big copper pieces because that’s what people wore then, with semi-precious stones.”

It was her paua shell and silver jewellery that really made her reputation. She was one of 12 jewellers selected for a travelling exhibition of New Zealand art overseas and the government often bought her pieces as gifts for foreign VIPs. Her work is currently on show at Te Papa in an exhibition called Precious Metals.

But 30 years of manipulating metal left its mark. “My hands were getting a bit arthritic, but also I just wanted a change.” So she applied to get into Bill Manhire’s famous writing course at Victoria University. Much to her astonishment she was accepted. By then in her mid-50s, she had a BA in English and a teaching diploma but no history of writing.

It was “a watershed year. I loved the course.” She adds with a smile, “I thought that perhaps my name was made, but it wasn’t like that. It took a long time to get anything published.”

Her first break came in writing for radio. “But I did want, desperately, to get published in print. It’s funny how you want that. When my stories were on National Radio I was aware they were reaching a very wide audience, wider than some novels do, but now it gives me great pleasure to look up at my bookshelf and see my four books sitting there.”

She worked for 10 years on Denniston Rose. “It was turned down several times by different publishers, and I rewrote and threw away what I’d rewritten. It’s a long story, going through the awful grind and depression over having your stuff rejected. I was at the point of giving up when Random House said yes and it became an instant best-seller, which was just wonderful.”

A visit to Denniston with her mother sparked off that first novel. “I’m not a West Coaster but I was fascinated to read about how isolated the women were there. I was more interested in writing about a community in isolation than in the pioneering side.

“History interests me and I love doing the research and the story-telling side but I don’t like to be branded. There is a bit of snootiness about historical novels being bodice-rippers. And I don’t like to think about writing in a genre. I prefer to write about what interests me.”

She has another pioneer novel on the go, set in the North Island. A seventh-generation New Zealander, she says her immersion in history has given her new pride in her heritage. “I never cease to marvel at how resourceful those early settlers were. People who came this distance from Europe and England must have had a lot of get up and go. They knew they’d never see their relatives again. They must have been quite special people in the way of being entrepreneurial.”

Pattrick and her second husband, Laughton, live just above the Botanical Gardens, in a 100-year-old grey-painted villa with a huge view. It’s been their home for 30 years. “It’s a lovely house; I don’t think we’ll ever move.”

A former head of music at Teachers College and singing tutor at the New Zealand School of Drama, Laughton now does musical direction for professional theatre. It’s a shared interest. Together, they have written songs for children that are in most schools. “One of our children’s shows, Upon Our Street, is touring at the moment with the New Zealand Children’s Theatre.”

Have the Pattricks not heard of retirement? She laughs. “We sometimes think that we should be retired but it doesn’t seem to be happening for either of us really, and it’s great.”

They each have their own space to work in. “Laughton has his music room and we’ve built on a study for me which is an absolute joy. I’ve got rows of books, and my son-in-law, who is a furniture maker, has made me a wonderful desk. It’s a real pleasure to be in here. Every day Laughton joins her for coffee and a mid-morning break. “It’s our morning routine.”

It sounds like a pretty great life. “It’s a good one,” she affirms. “I have very few regrets.”

Reprinted by permission. Copyright 2007 Plenty magazine Summer 2007 published for Hanover Group. Subscribe to Plenty today.

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