Since Anthony Alpers' first life of Katherine Mansfield in 1953, excellent literary biographies have been a feature of New Zealand writing.
Probably Michael King's lives of Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame have become best known, but a quick trawl down my bookshelves reveals biographies of Sylvia Ashton-Warner, David Ballantyne, James K. Baxter, Dan Davin, Geoffrey de Montalk, Maurice Duggan, A.R.D.
Fairburn, Denis Glover, Robin Hyde, G.B. Lancaster, John A. Lee, Margaret Mahy, Jane Mander, R.A.K. Mason, Ronald Hugh Morrieson, John Mulgan, Bill Pearson, C.K. Stead, Hone Tuwhare, and Guthrie Wilson (and I have probably missed some).
Rachel Barrowman's life of Gee joins her earlier life of Mason among the best in that group of literary biographies.
Barrowman began her book in 2006, after she received the Creative New Zealand Michael King Writers' Fellowship, the richest of New Zealand's literary awards, to research and write it.
Appropriately that year Gee received his last New Zealand Book Award (for Blindsight).
At the award ceremony, at which she was present, Gee implied in his acceptance speech that might be his final adult novel, while Salt, which was to be published in 2007, would be the last one for younger readers.
However, he went on to extend that novel into a trilogy with books in 2009 and 2010, and he added a final novel for adult readers, Access Road, in 2009.
Thus Gee's fiction-writing career continued for the first four years of Barrowman's writing process, but all of that coda to a 50-year career is contained in the book.
One publication arrived too late for inclusion - Gee's short booklet, Creeks and Kitchens: A Childhood Memoir, which appeared as an e-book in 2013 and as a paperback in 2014; it, however, is based on several earlier talks and essays which Barrowman does discuss.
Barrowman has said the book had taken her ''quite a bit longer than I had anticipated - which is all to do with life: mine - getting in the way along the way'' (which perhaps has helped her to understand how Gee's relationships and economic situation have affected his work).
She also pointed to Gee's ''long and very productive writing career: 17 adult novels, 13 children's novels, a volume of short stories (and writing for screen).
So it was always going to be a big job''. She has used her nine years to carry out that ''big job'' very well.
She has drawn on a rich variety of sources: personal interviews and emails; all of Gee's publications; some earlier drafts; many secondary published sources including interviews, profiles, reviews and criticism; letters to and from; family history, correspondence, and journals.
The resulting book, with its 456 pages of text and 51 pages of notes and references identifying those sources, is a full and balanced critical biography, always readable, essential reading for those wanting to know more about both the life and the work of the man whom Kevin Ireland in a review of this book has called ''our most admired and loved man of literature''.
Barrowman's simple subtitle is important, for this, unlike King's lives of Sargeson and Frame, is a critical biography, dealing both with Gee's life and his literary works, as is also shown by the chapter titles: 15 of the 33 are from the titles of his books of fiction and a 16th is from a television show for which he wrote scripts.
The relationship between life and work is crucial in two senses.
First, producing his literary works has been Gee's true work, his vocation, the defining activity of his life.
The central plot of the book is Gee's discovery of his writing vocation, his long struggle to make it his primary breadwinning work, his success in that endeavour when his attempt to become a full-time writer resulted in Plumb, vindicating the attempt and leading to more than 30 years of high literary accomplishment.
But that plot outline sounds like a conventional story of heroic individual struggle to success, while Barrowman also traces three sub-plots which strongly influenced that central plot-line and which concern Gee's relationships with three women: Lyndahl Chapple Gee, his mother; Hera Smith, the mother of his son Nigel; and Margaretha Garden Hickman, who became Margareta (without the `h') Gee, his wife.
His mother was the keeper of ''kitchen'', with ''creek'' one of the poles of his young life, making it a haven of warmth and love, herself an exemplar of the desire to write, and a prime source of the family history on which he drew in his fiction; she also was the source of what he called her ''twisted puritanism'' and its sexual problems that became the monkey on his back from which he had to struggle free.
Hera Smith was the dominant partner in a turbulent seven-year relationship, beginning in 1958, that threatened to derail his work and his life.
She is described by Barrowman as ''self-possessed and determined and very strong-willed'', and, as became ''increasingly apparent, slightly unstable'', a beautiful woman but someone with whom Gee had 'absolutely nothing in common''.
Gee first met Margareta in 1966 at the Turnbull Library, they began living together in 1968 and married in 1970, when her divorce from her separated husband came through.
Barrowman shows how she helped make it possible for Gee to become a full-time writer both through her supportive work as a librarian and through encouraging him to make his writing more economically viable by diversifying it to include writing for younger readers and for television (and she created a stable family life for him and their two daughters).
The second way Barrowman relates Gee's life and work is in showing how his writing presents fictionally transformed versions of places (providing other chapter titles), people, and events from his life (but not, he has said, the painful relation with Hera Smith): the Newington Rd house in the Henderson of his childhood and adolescence, with its kitchen and neighbouring creek and swamp; the Paeroa rooming house in 1955; the flat on Wellington's Ghuznee St in the late 1950s; Napier in the 1970s with its small-town ways; Nelson and Golden Bay in the 1980s; the Chapple family history.
Barrowman's biography usefully makes clear many of these links between Gee's life and his fictional works.
Barrowman avoids the potential pitfalls of the psychologising approach in which the biographer claims to know more about the inner workings of the biographical subject than he does.
She faces the contrast that has struck many observers between the quiet and gentle demeanour of the man and the darkness and violence evident in his fiction, from The Widow in 1955 through Access Road in 2009 and The Limping Man in 2010.
In the index under the general heading ''Maurice Gee: themes'' there are many entries under the sub-headings ''death and suicide'', ''drownings'', and ''violence, cruelty and loss'', but she does not speculate about a hidden darkness in the man expressed in these; rather, she quotes from his various statements about his ''obsession'' with ''pain and cruelty, violent acts'', about how he ''can't understand how human beings can be evil'', and she quotes him about how death, pain, cruelty, and violence are out there, facts of human experience that he has observed.
If Barrowman has chosen not to indulge in psychological speculation, she has probably been forced by the extent of Gee's 31-volume oeuvre and the constraints of the space available to her also to avoid attempting detailed critical analysis of all that he has written.
What she gives us is a full, documented account of his life and its interplay with his fictional works, a most welcome addition to the library of New Zealand literary biographies.
• Lawrence Jones is an emeritus professor of English.
The book
• Maurice Gee: Life and Work, by Rachel Barrowman, is published by Victoria University Press.
