All the Juicy Pastures

Greville Texidor was many things—a one-time Bloomsbury insider, a chorus-line dancer, former heroin addict, and anarchist militiawoman—as well as a writer who was influenced and encouraged by Frank Sargeson and his literary circle. A new biography by Margot Schwass has shed light on the little-known glamorous and tragic life of this writer who died by her own hand in 1964.

Margot Schwass stands infront of large old wooden door.

Margot Schwass ‘discovered’ Greville Texidor’s work in 1987 when she picked up the Victoria University Press edition of her short story collection In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say A Lot.

“I was instantly starstruck with what I found. This sophisticated, cosmopolitan female sensibility was something I’d never imagined encountering in mid-century New Zealand writing, which had seemed to me a very austere, taciturn, and masculine business.”

Margot took up a PhD with the University’s School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies to research Texidor’s life with a singular question in mind.

Cover of The Boyfriend paperback book. A mand stands in a white shirt and blue jeans.
Greville Texidor in the 1920s. Photography courtesy of Cristina Patterson Texidor.

“How did someone who had been painted by Augustus John, who had danced the Charleston in theatres from Paris to Buenos Aires, and been incarcerated in Holloway for her politics, end up washing clothes in a farm creek by the Kaipara Harbour?”

All the Juicy Pastures: Greville Texidor and New Zealand is the result of that research. It tells the story of an extraordinary life and puts Texidor’s small but essential work in vivid context. A new edition of In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say A Lot has been published alongside the biography.

All the Juicy Pastures: Greville Texidor and New Zealand by Margot Schwass. Published by Victoria University Press, paperback, photographs throughout, $40.

In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say A Lot by Greville Texidor. Published by Victoria University Press, paperback, $30.