Newspaper Article 1958 – Second Novel is to be Published

SECOND NOVEL IS TO BE PUBLISHED

Would you stay calm while searching the house for money to pay short postage on a letter if you thought that among the bundle in the postman’s hand there was an airmail from your London publishers about the fate of your second novel?

Hastings novelist, Eva Burfield (in private life Mrs T. G. Ebbett) only just managed to. And there was indeed a letter from her publishers Wright and Brown, accepting her second novel, “A Chair To Sit On.”

Among the first to be told was small daughter Bronwen. “Well, Mum, I’m not going to be in the paper and Dad won’t want to be either.” She had not forgotten the publicity when her mother’s first novel, “Yellow Kowhai” was published last April. And besides, Bronwen had news of her own. She had that day been promoted to Tiger [part of article missing]
just the incentive she needs to complete her third novel, “Tomorrow’s Skies” based on a plot of a story she wrote about 10 years ago.

She hankers too, to write a non-fiction book on family life, “Home to Mother” but, she says, her friends and family are reluctant material. All the same she is recording all the amusing bits, and they are numerous for she has a large family of brothers and sisters, just in case there is a change of heart.

There are a surprising number of would-be novelists in Hawke’s Bay, and several have asked Mrs Ebbett for advice. She tells them that a first novel is hard to put together but experience makes the craft easier.

Today, stimulated by two successes and the knowledge that “Yellow Kowhai” is being serialised by an Australian women’s magazine, time is lost if part of every day is not spent at her typewriter.  – Neil Hartley

Photo caption –

Mrs T. G. Ebbett
– Lovell-Smith