Ruth of Southland, with her glass eye and cardigans

Ruth of Southland, with her glass eye and cardigans

Most portraits of Ruth Dallas (born Ruth Mumford, 1919–2008) are taken from her left-hand side. Whether requested by the sitter or unconsciously adopted, this vantage point either obscures or minimises Dallas’s glass eye. Diana Morrow’s recently published A Writer’s Life, her captivating biography of Dallas—the first comprehensive study of “the Southern Woman of New Zealand letters”— gives it to us straight, painting a life as it was lived: brig…