Robin Hyde, the pseudonym used by Iris Guiver Wilkinson (19 January 1906 – 23 August 1939), was a South African-born New Zealand poet, journalist and novelist. Early life Wilkinson was born in Cape Town to an English father and an Australian mother, and was taken to Wellington before her first birthday. She had her secondary education at Wellington Girls' College, where she wrote poetry and short stories for the school magazine. After school she briefly attended Victoria University of Wellington. When she was 18, Hyde suffered a knee injury which required a hospital operation. Lameness and pain haunted her for the rest of her life. In 1925 she became a journalist for Wellington's Dominion newspaper, mostly writing for the women's pages. She continued to support herself through journalism throughout her life. Later life While working at the Dominion, she had a brief love affair with Harry Sweetman, who left her to travel to England. In 1926, in Rotorua for a holiday and treatment for her tubercular knee, Hyde had an affair with Frederick de Mulford Hyde. When Hyde fell pregnant, Frederick paid for her to have the child in Sydney, Australia. Their son, Christopher Robin Hyde, was stillborn. She was to adopt the name 'Robin Hyde' as a 'nom de guerre', to preserve his memory. On her return to New Zealand in December 1926, she discovered that Frederick had married. Traumatised by the loss of her child, Hyde was hospitalised at Queen Mary Hospital in Hanmer Springs and then cared for at the family home in Wellington, though only her mother knew of the pregnancy. After a period of recovery, she began to write again, publishing poetry in several New Zealand newspapers in 1927. She was also engaged to write columns for the Christchurch Sun, and the Mirror. However, she became frustrated at the lack of creative input, as the papers merely wanted a social column. Social columns or women's pages were the main outlet available to women journalists during the period. These experiences contributed to her treatise on journalism in New Zealand, Journalese, published in 1934. In 1930, while working for the Wanganui Chronicle, Hyde had an affair with the Marton-based journalist Harry Lawson Smith. Their son, Derek Arden Challis, was born in Picton that October. Lawson Smith was married, and his only relationship with Hyde and their son was to provide sporadic maintenance payments. In time Hyde's mother