topee

Both The Pea-Pickers and White Topee arose directly from life experience.

In 1954 another novel, White Topee, was published in Sydney.

It became obsessive in White Topee and in her own life.

In her two published novels, the Prior Prize-winning The Pea Pickers (1942), and its sequel White Topee (1954), Eve Langley engaged in subversive gender games and resignifications, including cross-dressing and picaresque adventures that could still be accommodated within the mainstream of relatively conventional narratives.

Frost's argument that the taint of "madness" is the reason that Langley's novels have been "immured in the vault", as she somewhat gothically images it, would appear to lack substance when one considers that White Topee was written, accepted, and published by Angus and Robertson after Langley's seven year incarceration in the Auckland Mental Hospital and well after her labelling as "schizophrenic".

A reading of the MSS of her unpublished novels reveals that there is a plethora of reasons ranging from commercial viability--after all, White Topee had hardly been the runaway success of its predecessor--to massive editorial constraints and problems in relation to such transgressive and radically unorthodox writings.