The older children were left at home with their mostly bedridden father. When her father’s health deteriorated, her mother became the sole bread winner, thus needing to take her younger children to school with her to sit in her classroom while she taught. She was the daughter of Francis Ashton Warner, a bookkeeper, and Margaret Maxwell, a schoolteacher 14 years his junior. Sylvia Ashton-Warner was born on December 17, 1908, in Stratford, New Zealand. Her ideas for a child-based or organic approach to the teaching of reading and writing, including key vocabulary techniques, have gained currency and are still used and debated internationally today. Sylvia Constance Ashton-Warner MBE (17 December 1908 – 28 April 1984) was a New Zealand novelist, non-fiction writer, poet, pianist and world figure in the teaching of children. She worked with Maori children in New Zealand before fleeing to North America.For the American silent film actress, see Sylvia Ashton.
She led a life of self-doubt, driven by passions, which lay behind a mask she dare not lower.
This is a biography of Sylvia Ashton-Warner who was a wife, mother, teacher, writer and artist. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. She thrived on love-hate relationships, was a deeply restless woman, flirtatious even in old age, alcoholic and, yet, as her biographer demonstrates, strangely charismatic. She was born in 1906 into an eccentric New Zealand family she combined a nontraditional marriage with an erratic career as teacher-writer. We're shown that life on her own terms was a condition set down by Ashton-Warner. This biography, the first book by New Zealand freelancer Wood, supplies factual evidence as to the parallels between Ashton-Warner's ambivalence in areas of her own life and that of the heroines of her novels, especially the bestseller Spinster.
Although her unorthodox approach to teaching Maori children-formulated on the concept of key vocabulary based on native imagery-won her international fame as an innovator, Ashton-Warner frequently expressed her dislike of teaching. Traces the life of the controversial New Zealand educator and novelist, and attempts to depict her complex personality Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Teacher-novelist Ashton-Warner is revealed in this rich, lively biography as a contradictory figure who, early on, was never one to let facts cloud the drama of a good story.
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