Joy Cowley

Born Cassia Joy Summers in the provincial town of Levin, New Zealand, on 7 August 1936, Joy Cowley was the eldest of the five children of Peter Summers and Cassia Gedge. As she records in her 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 flavor of Cowley's family life is reflected in her novels for older children—most recently in The Bakehouse (2015), set during World War II (when Cowley herself was a child).

The family moved frequently in Joy's early years, although they remained within the small towns in the regions of Wellington and the adjoining Manawatu-Whanganui district. The changing background may have fixed the early memories that surface in the vivid settings of so many of her works. Their neighbors in Foxton were Maori; they may have inspired the Maori characters that populate many of her novels and tales. Foxton is a twenty-minute bicycle ride from the coastal setting of Foxton Beach, where Joy used to accompany her father on the fishing expeditions that no doubt inspired her life-long love of the sea and her predilection for coastal settings; however, the Pacific setting of her children's story The Silent One (released as a movie in 1985) was inspired in part by a 1971 visit to Fiji.

Cowley proved slow at learning to read. Her breakthrough at the age of nearly nine was with Marjorie Flack's The Story of Ping. (Cowley's subsequent dedication to writing that would help children learn to read was reinforced when her son Edward found reading difficult.) Cowley moved on from Ping to become a voracious reader, consuming the classics available to her in the public libraries in Otaki and Foxton. She also became a contributor of stories to the children's pages of the local newspapers—although she had once been more occupied by drawing and painting, demonstrating an aesthetic sensibility that extended to all the arts, including music.

Cowley went to Foxton District High School, but she transferred for the second high-school year to the more rigorously academic Palmerston North Girls' High. This entailed more than three hours a day travelling to and from school by bus. Cowley's unusual ability was recognized by a number of her teachers. But the family had always struggled financially. Joy would have been required by her parents to leave school at the end of her third high school year had it not been for the intervention of her school principal.

So that she could continue into the fourth year while earning an income (this was, significantly enough, as editor of the children's page of the Manawatu Daily Times), Cowley boarded with the family of a Baptist minister in Palmerston North. Joy's own parents were religious. Joy had attended the Presbyterian Sunday School in the mornings, the Salvation Army Sunday School in the afternoons, and the Methodist version in the afternoons "every second Sunday" (Cowley, Navigation 178)—in the hope of qualifying for the book prizes awarded annually by all three. She had gone on to Bible Class and taught Sunday School. The morally repressive aspect of Presbyterianism 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 religious belief. She eventually converted to Catholicism in 1982.

Leaving school, Joy wanted to become a journalist, but her parents pressed her to take up an apprenticeship as a pharmacist. She enjoyed the human contact that life as a pharmacist in Foxton provided. She acquired a motorcycle and also learned to fly a Tiger Moth. Her enthusiasm for practical skills emerges in her 2013 YA novel Dunger, which represents the electronic devices now beloved of teenagers as inimical to physical survival and psychic health.

Pregnant with their first child, Joy married Edward (Ted) Cowley in 1956. The couple raised four children on their dairy farm near...