After her release, Langley published one other novel, White Topee, in 1954. She then took the extraordinary step of changing her name by deed poll to ‘Oscar Wilde’, and disappeared from the literary scene. Returning alone from New Zealand in 1961, she lived as a recluse in a cottage in the Blue Mountains until her death in 1974, her body found weeks after she expired.

Around these intriguing and troubling facts, whole tapestries of Eve Langley stories have been woven. The Pea Pickers was apparently autobiographical. Its features included the gender-bending sisters Eve and June, who called themselves Steve and Blue, their ambiguous relationships with fellow pickers (many of whom were Indian or Italian), and their passionate attachment, through their mother’s stories, to Gippsland (which they called ‘patria mia’). Then there was Eve’s later identification with Oscar Wilde and her preference for wearing men’s suits, a full-length fur coat, and a white topee. After her death, it emerged that she had sent numerous full-length manuscripts to her editors at Angus & Robertson, all typed single-spaced on pink onion-skin paper, but none of which was ever published.

Langley’s writing and her tragic life have been the focus of much attention over the years, beginning with the documentary film She’s My Sister, made soon after her death by Meg Stewart, daughter of her friend Douglas Stewart. Critic Joy Thwaite rose to the challenge of a critical biography (The Importance of Being Eve Langley, 1989), and Lucy Frost edited Wilde Eve, a 1999 anthology of nine excerpts from Langley’s New Zealand fiction. There is a plethora of critical essays on such topics as transvestism, lesbian desire, and queering national identity, as well as Langley’s racism and sense of settler-colonial entitlement. The continuing fascination with this writer is seen, too, in Mark O’Flynn’s novel, The Last Days of Ava Langdon (2016), based loosely on Eve and evocative of her creativity, her sensibility, and her Oscar Wilde persona.

Helen Vines, herself the author of two research theses on Langley, weighs in with this book, aiming to ‘rigorously distinguish the fiction from the biography’. She offers a ‘family biography’ based on scarce available evidence, and a long and revealing chapter, ‘Eve Langley and her editors’, based on voluminous correspondence in the Angus & Robertson archive between the Langley sisters, publisher Beatrice Davis, and Nan McDonald (a significant poet in her own right), who took on the massive job of editing both novels. Then there are chapters on Eve’s representation of family in her fiction, and her sister June’s representation of family in letters and interviews. From this array of evidence, and Eve’s late notebooks and drawings, Vines speculates that a history of childhood sexual abuse and paternal transvestism lay behind the secrets and evasions that characterise the sisters’ accounts of family, their unorthodox sexual behaviour, their later estrangement, and their episodes of mental distress.

While it is true that Eve later styled herself ‘Oscar Wilde’ and dressed in drag (though hardly of the kind that would hope to pass as a man), my sense is that Wilde the persecuted artist figure was the strongest element of her identification. The male artist identification is there much earlier, when in The Pea Pickers Steve dramatises herself as the young Werther, a lonely sorrowing spirit ‘thrown aside by the vortex of time’ that draws others into oblivion.

As far as sexual attraction is concerned, various scenes in that novel show Steve to be attracted to some men in an idealistic way, as channels through which she could access heroism – there is a strong overvaluation of heroic male qualities throughout. But towards her beautiful sister, and the woman she calls ‘the Black Serpent’, there is a strong sensual attraction, freely admitted. If the Black Serpent presents a threat at all to Steve, it is in the way she represents marriage and motherhood: ‘I had now met a woman who would firmly mould me back into the sexual mould from which I had fled, but which I secretly desired with all its concomitants, love, marriage and children.’ At the end of the novel, Steve, repressing this desire, sends Blue home to get married, to the ‘procession of perambulators’ that she herself has disavowed, choosing passionate solitude instead.

Historically speaking, beneath Steve’s contradictions and posturings in The Pea Pickers lies the dilemma faced by so many women artists in the 1920s: wanting to live free creative lives, yet aware that they could be all too readily trapped by pregnancy and motherhood (like Ernestine Hill, or Robin Hyde in New Zealand). Sexual desire often appears in their writing as the enemy of their ambitions. Eve Langley, some dozen years after the events recounted in The Pea Pickers, was an impoverished young mother of three, living in New Zealand and writing this ‘book of her life’. It was a lament for everything she had lost – youth, the chance of fame, and a claim on the ‘patria mia’ of which she believed she had been disinherited.