Gertrude Page

Gertrude Eliza Page 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. In The Rhodesian, 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.

Selected bibliography

Love in the Wilderness, 1907Paddy the Next Best Thing, 1908The Edge O' Beyond, 1908The Silent Rancher, 1909Two Lovers and a Lighthouse, 1910Where the Strange Roads Go Down, 1910Jill's Rhodesian Philosophy, or, The Dam Farm, 1910Winding Paths, 1911The Rhodesian, 1912The Great Splendour, 1912The Pathway, 1914Follow After, 1915Some There Are, 1916The Supreme Desire, 1916The Course of My Ship, 1918The Veldt Trail, 1919Far From the Limelight , 1920Jill on a Ranch, 1922

''The Mysterious Strangers''