Edith Lyttleton, who wrote popular colonial fiction under the pseudonym G. B. Lancaster, was born at 'Clyne Vale', a sheep-farming property at Epping, near Campbell Town, south of Launceston. She was the oldest child of Westcote McNab Lyttleton and Emily Wood, who had married in January 1873. The family moved to New Zealand when Lyttleton was six years old to live at 'Rokeby', a sheep station south of Christchurch. Lyttleton left New Zealand for England in 1909. In the 1930s she returned to Tasmania, the place of her birth, but eventually moved back to England.
She wrote over a dozen novels and some 250 short stories, mostly narratives of romance and adventure set in the remote back country of New Zealand, Australia and Canada. She was New Zealand's most widely read author overseas in the first half of the twentieth century, reaching millions of readers. Her books headed bestseller lists in the United States for six months in 1933 and she was awarded the Australian Gold Medal for Literature in the same year. Writing first from 'Rokeby' despite fierce parental opposition, she later travelled widely researching her stories in the Yukon, Nova Scotia and Tasmania. She never married and, with her sister, devoted many years to the needs of her mother. Her middle age was peripatetic and lonely but produced the four phenomenally successful epic novels for which she was best known (From Terry Sturm's biography of Lancaster/Lyttleton, An Unsettled Spirit, 2003, q.v.).
Lyttleton's first five short stories were published in the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine under the name 'Keron Hale'. Many of her later stories appeared in the Sydney Bulletin and the Melbourne Australasian and also in international magazines. Most of her novels were published by prestigious British and American publishing houses, and some were translated into foreign languages.Three of them and several of her short stories were made into Hollywood silent films in the early 1920s. Dr Paul Wallace, a Canadian-born and educated authority on Pennsylvania history, was a close literary friend.
