Essie Summers

On the 23rd of July in 1911, young Edwin Summers and his wife Ethel (neé Snelson) took ship from Newcastle-on-Tyne, headed for Christchurch, on the South Island of New Zealand. Exactly one year later, Ethel gave birth to a daughter, whom she and Edwin named Ethel Snelson Summers. As this meant that of the three people in the house, two could be referred to as Ethel Snelson Summers, the baby got a distinguishing nickname: ESSie, from her initials. Essie could remember the end of World War I, though she was too young to understand why all the adults in town had gone temporarily mad with joy, and she could remember the horrific "Spanish flu" epidemic...or, to be more precise, she could remember how much trouble she got into when her father discovered that she and her younger brother were playing a game of seeing which one could count the most funeral processions passing by the house. She lived very happily with her family in Christchurch until her twenty-eighth year, in which she fell in love with, and married, the Rev. William Flett, to whom she was VERY happily married indeed until Bill’s death in 1984. They were to have two children, Bill and Elizabeth. The younger Bill eventually married a young widow, providing Essie with three instant grandchildren – and shortly thereafter Elizabeth married a young widower, providing Essie with three more just as instantly. When Andrew was born to Elizabeth a couple of years later, it was a new experience for Essie: meeting just one new grandchild, rather than several at once. At four, Essie decided on her own to go to school, which she stubbornly did all year long without ever having been formally enrolled. When, the next year, she walked into the next form’s classroom, the school simply accepted the fait accompli. Ten years later the Depression forced her father out of business and Essie out of school, but by then the writing habit was firmly established, and the Australian Woman’s Mirror accepted her poem “Gypsy Heart” in 1931, when she was still only eighteen. Over the years that followed, Essie published poems, short stories, and articles in newspapers and magazines in New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom. She began trying her hand at novels in 1947, writing the original version of what would become Sweet Are the Ways, though it was rejected, for what Essie later considered to be perfectly sound reasons. In 1951 the Mirror published Revolt – and Virginia as a serial. In 1954, the Mirror gave Essie space for another serial, Meet on My Ground, but her first version of No Orchids by Request still found no takers. (Mills & Boon did, however, accept Essie’s close friend Joyce “Joy” Dingwell’s novel Australian Hospital that year. Essie was very offended on behalf of Joy’s husband Lennie when she heard that Joy had chosen to dedicate Australian Hospital to a friend rather than to Lennie, and it was not until Essie received and opened her own copy that she discovered that the friend to whom Joy had dedicated her first novel was Essie herself.) In December of 1958, the Fletts took the parish at Weston, and there Essie realized she wanted to write a novel about New Zealand’s farmers. With her characteristic determination, she set about pestering the sheep farmers in the parish with one highly detailed – and often very embarrassingly explicit – question after another, while writing the first draft of New Zealand Inheritance. But she was still distracted by her other writing, until Bill reminded her that she had always sworn to have a novel published by her 45th birthday, and that she was running out of time. Accordingly she buckled down, sent New Zealand Inheritance off…and again was rejected, but this time with a letter from Allan Boon saying that if she was willing to make major revisions along lines he suggested, Mills & Boon would publish it. With Bill’s help she took on the rewrite, sent it back in, and duly saw her first novel come into print, the day after her 45th birthday. Mills & Boon would come to publish Essie’s autobiography and 51 more of her novels, including rewritten versions of Sweet Are the Ways (ultimately her own favorite), No Orchids by Request, Revolt – and Virginia, and Meet on My Ground. At first she was doing double duty as both a minister’s wife and as a novelist, but chronic health issues forced Bill out of active ministry after he and Essie had moved to her beloved “little white house” in the Belleknowes suburb of Dunedin. There they lived for several years, as the children grew up and moved out and acquired children of their own, while Essie industriously produced two to three novels a year. They were even able to achieve Essie’s lifelong dream of going “Home” to England and Scotland for a year, though Essie kept on writing right through the trip. Meanwhile, Essie was serving as a mentor to other aspiring New Zealand writers, and also – thanks to her unequalled gift for painting in words the spectacular landscape of New Zealand – as a sort of one-woman New Zealand Department of Tourism. A remarkable number of overseas readers ended up scheduling vacations to the Antipodes just to see the country they had read about in Essie’s books (such readers were still coming to New Zealand as late as 2019, more than twenty years after Essie’s own death). In fact, Essie was offered an MBE for her services to New Zealand tourism. But she was a walking combination of humility, practicality, and good humour; so when notified of the honor she simply burst out laughing, said, “That’s not who I am!” and turned it down. In the late 1970’s, the Fletts moved from Dunedin to the warmer climate of Napier, where their son and his family were living. It would hardly be correct to say they “retired” there, since Essie kept right on writing; seventeen and perhaps eighteen of her novels were completed after the move. Even after Bill’s death in 1984, and even though the Mills & Boon / Harlequin model was moving away from the multi-character, wide canvas that Essie had made her own, she continued to produce one or two more Mills & Boon novels per year, and her world-wide sales continued to justify her nickname, “the Queen of Romance.” Finally, in 1987, she announced to her readers that High-Country Governess would be her last novel with Mills & Boon, as she was retiring to write her family history. Eight years later, however, The South Horizon Man appeared under the auspices of Severn House as Essie’s fifty-third novel – because, as she explained later to her readers, “When I got as far back as 1333 in the family tree, I decided that was enough and have now commenced writing novels again.” In August of 1997, as Essie was working on Design for Life, her 56th and final novel, she got word that Joy Dingwell had passed away. She and Joy had “walked the Alpine path” together both as struggling young writers and as world-famous authors, in a friendship that, like Essie and Bill’s marriage, had spanned decades. And Design for Life would, finally, bring a close to Essie’s own spectacular career. On the 27th of August, 1998, Essie died at the age of eighty-six. She was, and remains, one of the most successful writers of light romantic fiction of all time, and to this day no other New Zealand author in any genre has come close to her 19 million copies sold. But if you ask any of the friends and relatives who knew her well, they would unanimously tell you that she was even more remarkable as a mentor, a friend, a mother, and most of all a wife, than she was as a novelist. For the greatest of all Essie Summers romances was the real-life one she and her Bill wrote on the pages of their life together.