Gertrude Eliza Page (1872 – 1 April 1922) was an Anglo-Rhodesian novelist.
Biography Educated at Bedford High School, Page wrote for The Girl's Own Paper as a teenager. Marrying George Alexander "Alec" Dobbin in 1902, she moved with him to Rhodesia, where she died in 1922. Her Rhodesia novels were all written between the years 1907 and 1922."Empire, nation, gender and romance : the novels of Cynthia Stockley (1872–1936) and Gertrude Page (1873–1922)" (thesis), University of Cape Town. 1997. In The Rhodesian (1914), Page writes admiringly of agricultural productivity and colonial settlement in her "empty" Rhodesian landscapes: "The Valley of Ruins no longer lies alone and unheeded in the sunlight; and no longer do the hills look down upon rich plains left solely to ... idle pleasures."
Her best-selling book was Paddy the Next Best Thing, which was dramatized and performed in Britain at the Savoy Theatre. Another novel by Page, The Edge O' Beyond, of which more than 300,000 copies were sold, was also made into a play as well as being a 1919 film (directed by Fred W. Durrant, featuring Isobel Elsom, Owen Nares, Minna Grey, C. M. Hallard and Ruby Miller)."A Popular Novelist – Death of Miss Gertrude Page" – notification in The Times, quoted in "Gertrude Page - 'The Kipling of Rhodesia. The Woburn Sands Collection.Stephen Donovan, "Guns and Roses: Reading for Gender in The Rose of Rhodesia", Screening the Past, 16 August 2009.
Selected bibliography Love in the Wilderness, 1907 Paddy the Next Best Thing, 1908 The Edge O' Beyond, 1908 The Silent Rancher, 1909 Two Lovers and a Lighthouse, 1910 Where the Strange Roads Go Down, 1910 Jill's Rhodesian Philosophy, or, The Dam Farm, 1910 Winding Paths, 1911 The Rhodesian, 1912 The Great Splendour, 1912 The Pathway, 1914 Follow After, 1915 Some There Are, 1916 The Supreme Desire, 1916 The Course of My Ship (with Foster-Melliar), 1918 The Veldt Trail, 1919 Far From the Limelight (and other tales), 1920 Jill on a Ranch, 1922 The Mysterious Strangers
References
External links
"Gertrude Page - 'The Kipling of Rhodesia'. The Woburn Sands Collection. Gertrude Page Bibliography with numerous images The Wade Burgess Collection