SUMMARY
Winnie Gonley (1909-1995), my mother, was an Irish New Zealander who at the age of 28, in 1937, left friends and family for Europe. She stayed there the rest of her life but never changed her New Zealand passport for a British one. She was a feminist who for nearly sixty years put her man ?rst; a writer who published almost nothing; a Bohemian for whom Paris was eldorado but who spent most of her life as an academic wife in Oxford; a free spirit who brought up three daughters in an apparently conventional household; a well-educated and hard-working woman of great independence whose employment never remotely matched her abilities. And she was a woman who lived a rich and generous life.