Blanche Edith Baughan (16 January 1870 – 20 August 1958) was a New Zealand poet, writer, botanist and penal reformer.
Biography
Early life and education
Baughan was born in Putney, Surrey, England, on 16 January 1870, one of six children of John Baughan and Ruth Baughan (née Catterns). Baughan attended Brighton High School for Girls. In 1887 she began her studies at Royal Holloway College; she was one of 15 students who won an entrance scholarship of £50 a year. She studied for a London University degree graduating in 1891 with a BA Class 1 Honours in classics; it was the first First Class Honours degree awarded to Royal Holloway College and Baughan was one of the first women to attend the college.
Family
Baughan’s mother Ruth was mentally ill and in 1878 Ruth and John divorced after living apart for two years. After the divorce John Baughan moved the family to Brighton where he died in 1880. Ruth lived in several different psychiatric hospitals or with relatives until her death in 1902. Sources about Baughan have conflicting accounts of her family and life during this period: some record Baughan as caring for her mother however Baughan’s biographer Carol Markwell found no record of this. Similarly some sources assert that Ruth murdered John but Markwell’s research found that he died of natural causes.
After John’s death the family of six children continued to live in Montpelier Rd, Brighton with the eldest daughter Kate as head of the household. One of her sisters Minnie worked in the Scottish Women's Hospitals in Serbia during World War I.
After graduation
After graduation Baughan lived and worked in the Settlement Movement in Shoreditch and Hoxton in the East End of London. There she would have witnessed first hand poverty, disease, unsafe working conditions and poor living standards. After this she did private tutoring. She was active in the suffrage movement, having attended Royal Holloway College at the same time as suffragist Emily Davison. In 1894 Baughan visited Quebec and had a brief love affair but she did not progress the relationship; she had vowed not to marry as she thought married women had dull lives and she was concerned that her mother's mental illness might be hereditary. During this time she was writing poetry and her first volume was published in 1898. She also began walking and hiking in the Lake District.
Life in New Zealand
In December 1899 Baughan left England on the steamship Ruahine arriving in Wellington in 1900. She took up a domestic job in Ormondville. In 1901–2 she travelled around the Pacific Islands and Australia, returning to England in 1902 to attend her sister's wedding; she was in England when her mother died. On her return to New Zealand that year she settled in Chorlton on Banks Peninsula where she became involved with the community. In 1904 she travelled to Africa where she visited the Victoria Falls. She later wrote an article about the Falls in the Lyttleton Times. She made her last visit to England in 1906. In 1910 after some ill health she moved to Clifton in Sumner and finally to Akaroa in 1930. She became part of the literary community making friends with other writers such as Jessie Mackay, Johannes Carl Andersen, James Cowan and the Australian A.G. Stephens. Baughan, Jessie Mackay and another writer Mary Colborne-Veel founded the Canterbury Women's Club in 1913 to learn about topics of interest in the wider world such as social work, education, the arts and current events.
Baughan was a lover of the natural world. She called herself "a nature mystic". With her love of hiking and mountaineering, which had begun in England, she explored many parts of the country, writing about them in her travel essays. She collected plant specimens from the Westland side of the Copland Pass and a species of Ranunculus Ranunculus Baughani was named after her. In 1914, recognising that forest habitats and birds were being threatened, she joined conservationist Harry Ell and botanist Leonard Cockayne as founding members of the New Zealand Forest and Bird Protection Society; the society foundered during World War I but was succeeded by the Forest and Bird Society.