It is time for Dunedin, now proudly a Unesco ‘‘City of Literature'', to remember and honour a pioneer, formerly internationally famous, writer.
Her name was missing from the roll call when we applied for Dunedin's recognition - she does not have a plaque in the Octagon.
She is Frances Ellen Talbot, who wrote under the name ‘‘Thorpe Talbot''.
A celebrity as a popular novelist in her day, she was also journalist, travel writer, poet and author of fiction in short, and serial forms.
She became one of New Zealand's first and most successful writers.
She had very strong links with Dunedin, both in residence here and mention of the place and people in her writing.
But she has since been largely forgotten by history.
Thorpe Talbot was often published in Australian and New Zealand newspapers, including the Otago Daily Times and the Otago Witness.
Her greatest claim to fame was writing the novel Philiberta that won in 1881 the Melbourne Leader novel competition with £100 prize.
This led to the story being serialised and then Ward, Lock & Co, of London, published it as a hardcover book.
Philiberta was listed in the publisher's ‘‘Select Library of Fiction'' at 2 shillings a copy.
Other authors on this included Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott, with Mark Twain in a special humour section.
Mrs Beeton's famous cookbook was also on offer.
Ward, Lock had offices in both London and New York and established an Australian office in 1884 that probably printed the special Coles Book Arcade Australian edition of Philiberta.
Talbot got a good financial deal on this book, receiving not only a purchase contract price but also a promised royalty on every copy sold.
It is difficult to compare the value of the Australian £100 prize money in 1881 with today's currency.
One website (measuringworth.com) suggests it ranges from $A11,928 in purchasing power to an ‘‘income value'' of $A81,520.
Certainly, this prize money together with the book purchase and royalties must have been sufficient for Talbot to afford a six months' visit to California in 1886, where she penned a series of travel articles that appeared in the Otago Witness in 1887 as well as other newspapers in Australia and New Zealand.
If money had been short, perhaps her lifelong friend Judge Dudley Ward (not a relative of Ward the publisher but with rich contacts in England, and purchaser of lots of land in New Zealand), would have helped with some of her expenses.
My book Judge Ward published in 2011 describes the pair's relationship, with Talbot mainly living in the Maori Hill, Dunedin, house once known as "The Rest'' from the mid-1870s for more than 30 years.
Since publication, a distant relative of the Talbot family living in Australia recently got in touch with me, providing a few more facts about Frances' early years in Australia.
This house (still standing in Pollock St) appears to have been secretly owned by the judge from 1876 - although his ownership was not recorded on the title deed until immediately after his wife Anne, notable women's suffragist and first national president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, died in Christchurch in 1896.
Judge Ward remarried, to Frances Ellen Talbot ("Thorpe''), in ‘‘The Rest'' on January 6, 1902, when he was aged 74 and she 50, and he died in the house in 1913.
Talbot's youth was spent in Australia.
She arrived there aged only 3 after being born in, Yorkshire, England, in November 1851, and died in Dunedin in 1923.
At the age of 3, after her parents had separated, her mother Ellen migrated with her to Australia.
Her father must have died as Mrs Talbot remarried four months after arrival in Australia to John Lund and they lived in various towns in Victoria, having six children.
Frances Talbot must have received a good education and as a 15-year-old (inflating her age to 16 on the passenger list of the ship Otago) sailed alone to Hokitika in 1867. It was not long before she was touring New Zealand and started writing as Thorpe Talbot.
It is evident she visited all the main centres in her youth and wrote a sharp-eyed New Guide to the Lakes and Hot Springs as well as appending a daringly cheeky and satirical second half to the book called A Month in Hot Springs.
She also described many places in New Zealand, when Dunedin was then the principal city following the Otago goldrush.
Dunedin City Council arts and culture group manager Bernie Hawke was sympathetic when I approached him about recognition for Talbot.
He invited me to write an article about the writer for the City of Literature website page (www.cityofliterature.co.nz) and I certainly will.
I hope the historic success of one of our earliest writers soon becomes more remembered.
Unfortunately, copies of Philiberta are now rare and valuable.
The Hocken Collections has one that can only be read in the library.
New Zealand's only other known remaining copy is at the National Library, Wellington.
Footnote: a wish for the future is that a grave at the Andersons Bay Cemetery (Block 93, Plot 135) can be refurbished with a plaque acknowledging that Thorpe Talbot the writer lies below. It merely states ‘‘Ward'' - and the foliage hid that when I was there.
● Geoff Adams is a former editor of the Otago Daily Times.
Frances Talbot, better known as Thorpe Talbot in her writing.
"Dunedin will always live in my heart as the Queen City of New Zealand. The picturesque fashion in which it has spread itself over the hills, its handsome buildings and graceful, artistic and tall-spired churches, its tiny bay nestling in the hills, like a turquoise gem in an emerald and greenstone setting; its vividly bright aspects in fair weather, and its melancholy grey soft tints in the season of rain, when the clouds brood mournfully over the gloomy hills, its lively native bush and feathery forms, its small, clear babbling, sweetly named Water of Leith and its pretty waterfall, so prettily described in Thomas Bracken's best poems ... altogether Dunedin is a rare spot to tarry in.'' - Thorpe Talbot (From Philiberta)
