The Short Stories of Eileen Duggan

The Stories of Eileen Duggan presents the two collections of short stories Eileen Duggan wrote but did not offer for publication, and includes a Preface by the editor Helen J. O’Neill and a substantial introduction by John Weir. Eileen Duggan’s first poems were published in the Tablet in 1917, and by the time of her second full collection in 1936, she was internationally celebrated as the best poet New Zealand had produced, published, and widely reviewed in Ireland, Great Britain, and the United States. At home, however, her work had little appeal to the modernist movement led by Curnow, Glover, and Fairburn. Published here for the first time, these stories are tantalising evidence of the fiction writer Eileen Duggan could have become if she had not devoted her primary creative energy to poetry, and are an important addition to the canon of New Zealand literature.

Eileen Duggan (1894–1972) was New Zealand’s best known poet while she was writing and publishing. Helen J. O’Neill (Sister Leonie) graduated from Christchurch Teacher’s College in 1949 and entered the Sisters of Mercy as a novice in 1951.