Sylvia Ashton-Warner, novelist and educationist, was extraordinarily famous in the 1960s. She maintained that young children best learn to read and write when they produce their own vocabulary, especially sex words - like kiss, and fear words - like ghost. Educators lauded her.

Her autobiographical novels about teaching in remote schools, and being culturally abandoned in a remote country, New Zealand, attained enormous international popularity in both literary and educational circles.

But she had an intensely ambivalent relationship with the land of her birth. Despite receiving many...