True course to the past

Cristina Sanders' quest for authenticity in her historical fiction has sparked a love of tall ships and an obsession with an enduring maritime mystery.

- JANET WILSON

Ask historical fiction writer Cristina Sanders if history should be interpreted through the lens of modern values and she doesn’t hesitate. “People need to look at history in the context of the times,” she declares. “Nowadays, if we look at the past through our eyes, through our senses, through our sensibilities, we make misjudgments about all these people. And the things they did wrong and about the things they did right.”

Sanders is well acquainted with those different values. The self-described “61-year-old going on 12”, who has lived and worked around books all her life, began writing historical fiction only seven years ago. The result has been books portraying the vicissitudes of New Zealand pioneering life. Sanders writes as she lives: with energy, absorbed by ideas, in a call-a-spade-a-bloody-shovel way.

Her first novel, Jerningham, a New Zealand bestseller, inventories Wellington’s early European settlement and dramatises the story of real-life colonist Edward Jerningham Wakefi eld’s rise and subsequent demise. Jerningham is described on the back cover of the book as a “wild child” of the family. It’s a bold claim considering that his father, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, abducted his second wife, Ellen Turner, from school.