Lydia Wevers

She wrote three books, Country of Writing: Travel Writing About New Zealand 1809–1900 (2002), On Reading (2004) and Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World (2010), and edited a number of anthologies.

That research led to her historical work Country of Writing: Travel Writing About New Zealand 1809–1900 (2002) and a companion anthology Travelling to New Zealand: An Oxford Anthology (2000).

Together with Webby, she edited the first two anthologies of stories by Australian and New Zealand women writers: Happy Endings: Stories by Australian and New Zealand Women, 1850s–1930s (1987) and Goodbye to Romance: Stories by Australian and New Zealand Women 1930s–1980s (1989).

Lydia Joyce Wevers (19 March 1950 – 4 September 2021) was a New Zealand literary historian, literary critic, editor, and book reviewer.

Wevers was born in Hengelo, Netherlands, on 19 March 1950, to Mattheus and Joyce Wevers.

Her father was an architect and she had four brothers, including diplomat Maarten Wevers.

The family moved to New Zealand in 1953, and Wevers became a naturalised New Zealander the following year.

She grew up in Masterton and developed a love of reading as a child, saying in later life: "When I was a child, there had to be a special rule for me at Masterton public library that said I could borrow 12 books at a time instead of the usual two".

She attended St Matthew's Collegiate School, where she was head girl and dux.

She was the only student in her school year to attend university.

Wevers lived in Wellington, and was married to public servant and diplomat Alastair Bisley.

They had two sons and a daughter.

On returning to New Zealand in 1973 she became a lecturer in Renaissance literature at Victoria University of Wellington, and subsequently developed expertise in New Zealand literature.

Compared to a 1977 anthology edited by Riemke Ensing, it was described by The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature as having a "better range of theme, consistency of achievement, and more generous space".

During her early career, Wevers spent periods living in Australia and working at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney where she developed an interest in Australian literature.

In the early 1980s she met Australian scholar Elizabeth Webby and became involved with the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL).

In 1988 she edited Yellow Pencils: Contemporary Poetry by New Zealand Women, which was one of the earliest anthologies of New Zealand's women's verse.

Her doctoral thesis, completed in 1990, is on the history of the short story in New Zealand.

It followed her doctoral thesis, A History of the Short Story in New Zealand (1990).

Her chapter "The Short Story" in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (1991, edited by Terry Sturm) was the first academic discussion of the history of New Zealand short stories.

From 1998 to 2001 she was appointed as a senior research associate at Victoria University, and the principal researcher for a project on the history of print culture.

She was an academic at Victoria University of Wellington for many years, including acting as director of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies from 2001 to 2017.

Her academic research focussed on New Zealand literature and print culture, as well as Australian literature.

She was the director of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University from 2001 to 2017.

At the time Wevers was appointed a part-time director, the university had been considering the centre's closure, and it was through her efforts that the centre became an integral part of the university with additional staff members, connections with other research institutes and a broad scope of research into New Zealand society, history and culture.

In this role she mentored a number of young female and Māori academics, and had a particular role in supporting the centre's Treaty of Waitangi Research Unit.

In 2002 she founded the Journal of New Zealand Studies, a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary journal for articles with a focus on New Zealand.

In 2004 her essay work On Reading, commissioned by Lloyd Jones, was published as part of the Montana Estates essay series.

She opened the essay by saying:

"I suffer from an illness, an illness which has no cure, no limit and no end. It’s compulsive, expensive, consuming and addictive, it fills my house and my life and my time – I refer of course to reading."

She assisted with Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand from its inception in 2005, including writing the section on Fiction.

In 2009 she presented the Dorothy Green Memorial Lecture for an ASAL conference, titled The View From Here: Readers and Australian literature.

In the opening, she joked: "I am a New Zealand reader of Australian literature. That makes me just about a category of one. The reverse category, an Australian reader of New Zealand literature, is also a rare beast, though perhaps there is a breeding pair in existence."

In 2010, she published Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World, an exploration of the history of the 2000-volume Victorian library at Brancepeth Station.

In 2012 she organised and ran an ASAL conference in Wellington, which was the first and only ASAL conference held outside of Australia.

In the 2017 New Year Honours, he was appointed a Companion of the Queen's Service Order, for services to the State.

She died at home on 4 September 2021, and was buried at Mākara Cemetery.

She obtained an undergraduate degree from Victoria University of Wellington, followed by a MPhil at St Anne's College, Oxford on a two-year Commonwealth Scholarship.

After her retirement in 2017 she was appointed an emeritus professor and continued to be involved with a number of university projects and teaching work.

John McCrystal in a review for The New Zealand Herald described the book as a "little gem of a social history", in which Wevers did "a wonderful job of evoking the world of those who lived and worked at Brancepeth at the end of the 19th century".